Simply deploying a "hello, world" Rails app to EC2 can take hours of intense mental effort and trial-and-error. AWS's documentation is often obtuse, incomplete, or out of date. Using AWS by itself is time-consuming and difficult.

Heroku makes deployment easy, but if you use Heroku, you're not using AWS, you're using Heroku. Heroku puts up a wall between you and your AWS infrastructure, meaning you can't manage your AWS infrastructure directly. Plus Heroku is expensive.

What if there were something in between? What if there were a tool that provided the dead-simple ease of use Heroku provides, but didn't put up a wall between you and your AWS infrastructure?

This is the aim of Exosuit. Exosuit is a free, open source tool that lets you deploy Rails applications to AWS easily, quickly, and simply.

• I should be able to deploy a fresh Rails application to AWS with a single command and be all set within seconds.
• Exosuit's documentation should be written in plain language and easy to understand, even for a beginner.
• Exosuit's command-line interface should be intuitive. When things go wrong, helpful, intuitive error messages should be provided.
• Exosuit should help make AWS management easier, but when I want to, I should be able to manage my AWS infrastructure directly.

See the Getting Started with Exosuit page for installation and usage instructions.

As of this writing (September 2019), Exosuit is only at the idea stage. I've written a tiny, tiny amount of code for it. You can feel free to try to take it for a spin but you should set your expectations very low.

For more information about Exosuit, you can email me at jason@codewithjason.com and/or contact me on Twitter.