It depends on your requirements and environment. With most things I am working on the commands to deploy both look exactly the same: $ rsync -a foo server:/o

It depends on your requirements and environment. With most things I am working on the commands to deploy both look exactly the same: $ rsync -a foo server:/opt/foo $ rsync -a bar server:/opt/bar Can you guess which one is a static binary written in Go, and which one is a directory with a slimmed down JRE produced by jlink + an application jar? For those using containers, there's no practical difference between the two.