Moving small apps from Engine Yard to EC2

When we first started at engine yard we hosted all of our applications on it, it made sense at the time, as our goal was to offload as much work from our limited resources as possible, but now that our skill levels have increased and our apps have matured, it doesn't seem as needed.

For example, our company site www.sympact.net does not get very much traffic as we don't have much of a consumer sale model.  The site is a rails 2.1 app, with a basic cms, and the only gem dependency is haml.  What justification is there for hosting it on EY?  I'm sure an engine yard representative would probably ask us why we were hosting it there in the first place and my answer would be peace of mind.  Now that we want to scale our main application out at EY, we want to best utilize out hosting budget at EY. 

As you may know, engine yard is expensive with each slice costing us $379/month (in our configuration).  Resources are very scarce, with only 3-4 mongrels recommended to be run in the memory allocation given to each slice.  Why are we giving up 1-2 of those mongrels over two slices($379) to apps that don't need it? Well that question is what lead us to EC2, and more specifically (ec2onrails + RightScale). $72 per month, per app (EY charges $50 bucks for additional apps + the slice costs).

EC2 on rails is a gem and AMI that is great for setting up rails applications that don't need very much customization.  Right Scale allows us to easily configure and design our instances... for Free. This basic setup has brought us down to a single point of failure, but we have accepted that risk for now, and still think we can scale to a redundant environment at a lower cost then EY.  Also, we now have more mongrels than before (5 in the out of the box configuration).

Just to be clear, the intention of this entry is not to bash EY, Sympact still loves and uses EY for our core application.  In fact the reason we are moving the other applications to EC2 is to get more of our EY resources for the main application.  Just be cautious about your budget with Engine Yard because your going to want more! You are going to want more slices, more memory, more cpu, and it is going to cost you.  Keep the mission critical stuff there, get the rest out.

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