Thanks :) I agree with keeping it simple. Use something like heroku if it meets your needs. Atmos is for when that stops being cost effective or practical. Chances are, once you evolve past the proof of concept stage, you'll need more than a one-size-fits-all tool can deliver. Atmos strives to give you the toolkit to make that happen in the easiest and most maintainable way possible. Atmos-Pro will accelerate that for you by providing recipes that work out of the box for common infrastructure patterns.
HN user
wr0ngway
Working with your brain takes just as much effort as working with your muscles. Think back to taking a multiple hour exam in school, and how knackered you'd feel at the end of it. Now imagine doing that for 8+ hours every day, trying to solve problems that you don't even know have a solution. Yes, your body may still be ready to go, but there's nothing left upstairs to make it happen.
Not much, that was one of my focuses in the current release as we needed to deploy a sinatra app. I think the only thing that missed the release was generating a Rakefile into the project root for non-rails projects. Here's what ours looks like: http://gist.github.com/189256
Ping me on the rubber mailing list if you have any questions - I'd be interested in hearing how this works out for a non-rails app for someone other than myself :)
If you are looking for a free tool for rails deployment, check out my project http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber (The Quick Start section gives a good feel for it) - while the EC2 account isn't free, its not too bad, especially if you aren't running a full time instance. I've also done some abstracting out of the ec2 bits, so theoretically you could write a slicehost/other adapter if you were so inclined.