Heroku-like Amazon EC2

Question

Is there anything that I can install on my EC2 instances that make AWS Heroku-like?

e.g:

• heroku create app
• git push

But for AWS.

Answer 1

Well, now there is! It's called AWS Elastic Beanstalk (still in beta, as of March 2013)

After running the initial setup, further deployments should be as simple as git aws.push

EDIT: Just a nice and broad overview of deployment possibilities at AWS, by Werner Vogels (AWS CTO):

Answer 2

There are few topics I need to touch on before I can answer your question thoroughly; so please, bear with me.

A bit of insight

With respects to your two examples, Heroku utilizes a number of different technologies in order to achieve the level of simplicity it provides as a service platform. One of these technologies include: Heroku's proprietary toolbelt, which offers a set of command-line tools —that allows developers to interface with their applications— and an interact with many of the tools Heroku provides —such as terminal access for a number of different languages. The toolbelt itself relies on two other technologies: Ruby and Git; which come prepackaged with the install.

In a nutshell

Now, when you create a Heroku app you are effectively creating a git repository on the celedon cedar runtime stack (by default); this repository is then added as a remote repo. This allows you to immediately run git push heroku master. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes: for instance, when you push, your commits get intercepted by a git pre-receive hook which runs your app through a slug compiler and prepackages it for distribution across the dyno manifold; yet, I digress. For more information on more advance topics, check-out: https://devcenter.heroku.com/; there is a wealth of information here to read.

The stack

Now, let me explain the cedar stack as this is mainly what your question concerns. The Celedon cedar is one of many; however, this is the current default (for many reasons). This polyglot runtime stack currently provides six web languages (at the time of writing,) running on Ubuntu (11.04 stable, I belive). All of these technologies are operating on top of the AWS EC2 computing environment.

So to finally answer your question: You will need to install a suitable operating system such like: Ubuntu; a set of languages such like: Ruby, Python, Node.js, etc; Git (for deployment) and the rest is up to you.