I've done this for a few years, and when it's all setup the integration with the underlying system is absolutely wonderful. In particular, your app is "just" an

I've done this for a few years, and when it's all setup the integration with the underlying system is absolutely wonderful. In particular, your app is "just" another package - there's no magical special-casing you ever need to think of. You can also make your app quite modular - you can build multiple binary packages from one source which is perfect for different server roles that share a lot of code or configuration. The only drawbacks are the fair amount of knowledge you need to share within your team, as well as quite a bit of machinery needed to get everything up and running once you move beyond a single "dpkg -i"-able .deb (some sort of APT repo, signing keys, blah blah).