And this common refrain is the shrill cry of someone who hasn't had to manage a Ruby on Rails application. Application libraries are the domain of the developer

And this common refrain is the shrill cry of someone who hasn't had to manage a Ruby on Rails application. Application libraries are the domain of the developer, not operations. Your job is to give me a stable system for me to deploy on top of, not to dictate what I can and cannot deploy. Rubygems and bundler makes updating your application stupidly easy. I blogged about it here: http://bottledup.net/2013/01/10/bundler-and-gemfile/ http://bottledup.net/2013/01/10/bundler-and-gemfile/ but if you have a good Gemfile and automated CI then all you need to do is `bundle update rails` and then deploy your code. This is at least as easy as using apt to update your stuff.