I have been using http://beanstalkapp.com/ to do automated deployments. Basically it is Github + some nicer deployment features and a corporate repo focus. (Private by default, easy to add / remove / manage account access when adding or removing employees.)
I have experimented with EC2 Beanstalk and AWS OpsWorks. Both are horrible, and I do not recommend them. The documentation is incredibly obscure, with gaping holes for even basic use cases and I found the deployments themselves to be slow to complete, and unreliable, frequently having issues that were extremely hard to diagnose because of hard to access logs and cryptic error messages.
Git is by far the best deployment system in my opinion, especially if you can automate the code to get each server instance to automatically pull when needed.
But for beginners Beanstalk (http://beanstalkapp.com) is the absolute best. It is dead simple to set up a Git repo on the service, and then Beanstalk's servers will automatically deploy via SFTP to servers (or even directly to Amazon S3 for static content, even invalidating CloudFront caches), and you instantly have a secure deployment mechanism out of the box with no fiddling required.
With Node.js code if you are running your server through Forever you can easily configure it to watch the code directory for changes and restart the server when needed. End to end setup is extremely quick, and it is incredibly reliable.
I don't agree that git is best for deployment and that beanstalk is focused on beginners - git deployment actually for beginners and beanstalk becomes much more handy when you have more than 1 server and 1 developer. Also, not in all languages "git pull" is enough, sometimes you need to run custom commands after that to run external (to git) tools.
I have experimented with EC2 Beanstalk and AWS OpsWorks. Both are horrible, and I do not recommend them. The documentation is incredibly obscure, with gaping holes for even basic use cases and I found the deployments themselves to be slow to complete, and unreliable, frequently having issues that were extremely hard to diagnose because of hard to access logs and cryptic error messages.
Git is by far the best deployment system in my opinion, especially if you can automate the code to get each server instance to automatically pull when needed.
But for beginners Beanstalk (http://beanstalkapp.com) is the absolute best. It is dead simple to set up a Git repo on the service, and then Beanstalk's servers will automatically deploy via SFTP to servers (or even directly to Amazon S3 for static content, even invalidating CloudFront caches), and you instantly have a secure deployment mechanism out of the box with no fiddling required.
With Node.js code if you are running your server through Forever you can easily configure it to watch the code directory for changes and restart the server when needed. End to end setup is extremely quick, and it is incredibly reliable.