Paul Dowman has put together a feature-packed Ruby on Rails focused "appliance" for Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud - effectively an on-demand, flexible VPS service). Those who know what they're doing can try it out right away, using the AMI id: ami-4e907527.

The image is built upon Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), Rails 1.2.3, Ruby 1.8.5, MySQL 5, and includes the EC2 command line tools along with automatic backup of MySQL databases to S3 every ten minutes. Applications are served up using Mongrel clusters behind Apache 2.2. Paul's blog post includes more details and a guide of how to use it.