Half a year go, AWS dropped their out-of-the-box support for Ruby applications. It is still remaining in the Chef 11 stack, but if you wish to use a new Chef 12, you are on your own. That’s where opsworks_ruby kicks in - it allows you to leverage all the goodies of AWS OpsWorks (like applications, layers, connected RDS etc.) just the way Chef 11 stack did, without any extra JSON configuration. This is a much simpler solution, than implementing your own recipes (like application_ruby for example) and keep track of all those JSONs all the time. And besides, it includes many framework, web and app servers out of the box.

Also includes fancy configurator as a bonus :)