How easy is it to interactively provision an new EC2 instance nowadays? When I wrote an eerily similar blog post (scripted install of node 0.2.1 on EC2) last year I didn't really enjoy the process of setting up my zones and picking an Alestic image, etc.
By contrast, I've set up my first Rackspace Cloud VPS a few months ago and the install was a few clicks followed by them emailing me the SSH connection info. I'm not making any claims about the serviceability of one product over another, but the "I just want to try it out" story for Rackspace ca. July '11 was far better than EC2 ca. September '10.
Edit: I was also put off by the many meters of EC2 pricing... I never really knew ahead of time what costs I was going to incur. With Rackspace it was easy for me to calculate $10/mo. for a single Ubuntu box. Perhaps I missed a tool on EC2 that I should've known about?
I can't speak for amazon back in '10 as we've only recently adopted the system, but I assure you this isn't the case nowadays.
Launching an instance takes < 30 seconds and is a matter of a few clicks, the author of this post chose to use an external AMI which makes things a bit trickier and entails a few extra steps.
The AWS APIs are a twisty maze of passages, all [nearly] alike.
The management console is okay if you just want an instance or two, but it still strikes me that AWS is best when you want (or need) to automate allocation of cloud services. Libraries like Python's Boto are great way to get the basics taken care of, like working with S3 and spinning up/shutting down EC2 instances, without having to fret too much about the raw AWS APIs.
Beyond the basics, it's quite common to want to spin up a web of resources (EBS, load balancers, security groups, elastic IPs) along with new EC2 instances. The console isn't ideal for that, but Cloud Formation is fairly good: CFN allows you declare the resources you want and their relationship to one other. Construction is transactional, so you either get a working web or you get nothing. The Cloud Formation syntax is JSON and a little wonky -- there are things like functions to do table lookups so you have some semblance of making choices -- but it's serviceable.
(For sanity we use YAML for Cloud Formation and convert to JSON before sending it up to AWS. JSON lacks comments and sucks to hand-edit on deeply nested structures. Some of our YAML is hand-written; some of it generated by our Fabric scripts.)
The new AWS console is super easy to use. I've never played with Rackspace Cloud but it takes about 2 minutes to provision a new server on EC2 these days.
By contrast, I've set up my first Rackspace Cloud VPS a few months ago and the install was a few clicks followed by them emailing me the SSH connection info. I'm not making any claims about the serviceability of one product over another, but the "I just want to try it out" story for Rackspace ca. July '11 was far better than EC2 ca. September '10.
Edit: I was also put off by the many meters of EC2 pricing... I never really knew ahead of time what costs I was going to incur. With Rackspace it was easy for me to calculate $10/mo. for a single Ubuntu box. Perhaps I missed a tool on EC2 that I should've known about?