Trebuchet
Trebuchet is a gem for distributed performance testing. It spins up arbitrary ec2 micro servers, and does performance testing from them.
To set up trebuchet, install it normally with gem, then copy down the trebuchet.yml.example and rename it trebuchet.yml. Then update it with your revelvant information.
To run arbitrary load tests, you can use trebuchet from the command line
trebuchet -s 5 -c 100 -t 20M http://www.example.com
-s: Number of Servers to spin up
-c: Number of Concurrent Users per Server
-t: Amount of Time to run the test (ex. 10S, 5M, 1H)
When you run from the command line, Trebuchet will spin up the required servers in your
Alternatively, you can invoke Trebuchet's internal ruby classes to spin up servers, and run multiple load tests then terminate all the servers it spun up. It will not terminate any other servers you have running in EC2.