Deployment of rails used to be pretty awful (around the time Zed linked by aaronem raged in the ghetto), but for the last few years it's been painless, at least

Deployment of rails used to be pretty awful (around the time Zed linked by aaronem raged in the ghetto), but for the last few years it's been painless, at least if you use passenger. Deploy is now straightforward, and upgrading Apache/Ruby has not been a problem. I've upgraded a few apps from 1.x to 4.2 without issues, and with minimal changes (2->3 was the big one, changes were for new features like the pipeline, and bundler), and have some still on 3.x because features took priority over upgrades - the experience has mostly been as you describe for me - you upgrade the framework, and everything in your app just works, modulo a few tweaks for upgrading gems that I use like devise. There have certainly been glitches for some people though, and regressions, and it's probably on the more experimental end of the frameworks spectrum.