Scaling a web application is a very hard problem, especially for small project and teams who do not have sufficient manpower, money, and time to solve this problem. Luckily Amazon already had to solve this problem in their datacenters and offers their services to other developers. This talk will introduce the two most important Amazon Web Services, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Simple Storage Service (S3), and will present different ways to leverage them in your own Rails application.

Several use-cases will be covered that show how S3 and EC2 can be used to move load from your servers to Amazon’s or even to completely host your application at Amazon. The use cases will be presented in the manner of "problem – idea – concrete implementation."

Topics covered will include:

After the talk developers should know when and how to use Amazon’s services to scale their own application at low costs.