grails on ec2 - bitnami tomcat 7 stack vs 'vanilla' Ubuntu instance

Just started prepping AWS ec2 account for small grails app deploy and would like to know your thoughts on deploying to bitnami instance with tomcat7 vs going through the process of installing java, tomcat and doing configuration by hand.

Any pros and cons in relation to one or the other? I'm planning to use h2 in embedded mode (at least for now) so I'm not worried about MySql instance at this point.

I'm trying to keep the whole process as simple as possible and keep the overhead to a minimum. Thanks in advance.

I currently use the bitnami stack for some of my grails apps on ec2 I like it but I'm used to how bitnami has placed everything, if you are more comfortable with vanilla ubuntu use that.

If your main goal is to do simple deployments you should consider looking into some of the PaaS offerings, Elastic Beanstalk is build on top of EC2 and should make things very easy to deploy, but it may have its own issues with storing data from H2 I haven't looked into that.

A few other PaaS to look at:

• OpenShift
• CloudFoundry
• Heroku [Seems early for using Grails there]