We work on a lot of Ruby on Rails applications at reInteractive. In fact, so many that we got to a point where we created a whole Operations Division just to keep our client applications online and maintained. This spawned our Sentinel Service which provides Operations as a Service (OaaS) for our clients.
But why would you use something like OaaS? With the current Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings out there getting more and more sophisticated, why would you outsource this to a company like us?
Well, the TL;DR answer is quite simple, efficiency and best practices.
As a business owner, you can of course have your development team handling all the deployment and online management of your application. They can handle when the site crashes, get it back up and running and keep it patched to the latest security versions. This is all possible and many companies successfully do this.
Where this starts to fall down though is through several key areas:
1) Departing Knowledge Risk What happens if your key developer who built your entire stack and has all the knowledge in their head gets up and leaves or is involved in an accident? Could your operation quickly and simply replace their knowledge or is deployment a concatenation of edge case work arounds? Is your deployment process documented? Is it written down and so smooth anyone can do it?
2) Best Practices
