The document discusses deploying Ruby on Rails applications to Amazon EC2 using Capistrano and Rubber. It introduces the speaker and their company SnapMyLife, which uses these tools to deploy their photo sharing site to EC2. Some challenges of using EC2 mentioned include the transient nature of instances, needing redundancy, backups, and scripted instance setup to minimize downtime during rebuilds. Solutions proposed are using elastic IPs for roles needing static addresses and DNS round robin with a short TTL.