I'm a developer, and it seems ec2 has made it possible for a amateur sysadmin like me to setup and maintain a fairly large set of servers.

Now I don't mean to undermine real sys admins, as I know the value of them but what I am trying to get at is that someone like me can setup and maintain a cluster of servers (front end web servers, with some db servers) using tools like ec2 and capistrano with the help of google.

Now this isn't something I would do as a long term thing, but as a startup, one-man operation, I think I can pull this off until business takes off and I can hire this important role out.

With ec2, I get my firewall, so I basically open up port 80 on my public facing server, which will run haproxy and route requests to my cluster of servers.

Ofcourse I am simplifying the setup, but just want a feel for what you guys think about my perception.

My application is a web application, that will be runing Ruby on rails (passenger) and talking to mysql or postgresql.