That's the time to do from-zero provisioning. It is roughly comparable with the amount of time it takes to get a bare-metal VPS spun up and running, if you have Capistrano tasks which are sufficiently up to date to do it for you. (Upload keys, create accounts, apt-get big nasty list of software, install rails, install all gems and dependencies, set config files, check out code, etc etc.)
(If you are doing toy applications, you can get a Heroku instance spun up in under a minute, but I have never had a non-toy Heroku application work on the first try. There is virtually invariably a gem which works fine locally and then dies hard when you expose it to the Heroku environment. After you've debugged and addressed this, subsequent deploys on Heroku take about as long as subsequent deploys via Capistrano.)
Heroku is a wonderful, wonderful system, but "git push look-ma-no-sysadminning-whee" it is not.
We ported a pretty hefty application to Heroku, and surprisingly, didn't have much customization that needed to happen in regard to gems. We did have a hand written Nginx module that we had to toss out, and took care of the stuff we needed to take care of on the Rack level. The Rack middleware we had to write was really minimal, and took only an hour or two to write and test. The application gets around 20-60 rq/s on Heroku, and we haven't had to touch a thing since the migration (/me knocks on wood).
By having full access to EC2 you naturally can do things that are either considerably harder or just not possible with heroku. If you don't need that additional flexibility, then by all means, use heroku as it may be the best tool for the job.
i wouldnt argue against this point or any of the others in response. i was more musing out loud about how an hour just doesn't seem that fast to me anymore whereas a few years ago, it would have.
According to the article, it's an hour (ish) for the initial setup, around 20 minutes to provision new infrastructure (add or remove instances), and around 10 seconds to deploy. The key point being you don't need to add a new server every time you push code.
