Evalutating Chef for ec2 management

[snacktime <snacktime@gmail.com>]

I'm brand new to chef and looking at it as a possible solution for configuring ec2 instances.  The project I am working on is a job scheduler that uses ec2 nodes.  It's designed to start up and configure ec2 nodes, then hand out jobs to the running instances, monitor them, start/stop new servers based on various conditions, etc..  Similar to the Condor scheduler but all in ruby/rails.

One of the main goals is to be able to use any ami, which means the system has to be able to configure a new instance from the ground up when it boots.  So far I've been designing around using Capistrano + custom tasks.  Creating a bunch of rake tasks works fine, but something like Chef could help standardize things more.   Would Chef solo be a good fit here?  Could I push out recipes to a new instance with capistrano and run them without having to use a Chef server?

Chris