Ruby Interface to AWS Elastic Load Balancing Service

The AWS group is hard at work. They responded to the market demand with a load balancing service called, true to form, Elastic Load Balancing.

It's really slick - but generating soap or rest commands from scratch isn't all that fun, so we upgraded our Appoxy-aws gem and added an interface to the ELB service.

Now, using Capistrano, we simply use one command:

cap appoxy:launch_instance

To launch an EC2 instance, provision the system, deploy our code, and (with the new ELB interface), automatically attach the server to our load balancer.... viola, more capacity, testing server, staging server, redundancy, you name it.

Central to this strategy is provisioning and deploying almost everything using Capistrano. Building a full AMI sounds nice, but rebuilding an AMI after a gem update isn't very efficient.

Here's appoxy-aws: http://github.com/appoxy/aws/tree/master

Also if you want our Ubunty Jaunty clean AMI with Ruby 1.9 search for: ami-51769738

Finally, thanks again to RightScale for building the RightAws libraries that made appoxy-aws possible.

Cheers,

Chad