Last week I talked a bit about why instant deployment matters. A few people have since commented that it’s not instant deployment that matters to them, but rather deployment that just works every time.

Of course, what we’re really talking about is both. Part of achieving deployment that just works is decreasing complexity and removing steps – each a point of possible failure. We are working toward deployment that’s both instant and completely reliable, because we think those things are tightly linked.

We’ve rolled out some new content today explaining more about how our platform works, including some more detailed architectural information. We’re hoping...

Application deployment is changing. In relatively short order I’ve gone from buying hardware, to monthly hosting, to metered CPU time, and from building my open-source software manually, to package managers, to fancy config tools and recipes to pre-build whole machine images. What’s next?

The Old Way

I can deploy Rails apps in a traditional hosting environment pretty quickly. For a small app, I might make a new unix user and database on a personal Slicehost slice and do a quick code checkout. After setting up a few permissions and twiddling my Nginx config, in a matter of fifteen minutes or so my app is online. Not bad at all.

For a bigger app, it takes more time. In days of...