I spent the last year and a half cross-training from dev to ops. One of the most important lessons I learned: use operating system packages for production; don

I spent the last year and a half cross-training from dev to ops. One of the most important lessons I learned: use operating system packages for production; don't compile from source. Compiling from source: - Wait minutes for each instance to come up, as each time requires a fresh compile - Have to download from ruby-lang.org -> you have a dependency on this site being up, bad idea when you hit a load spike, need to scale, and ruby-lang.org is having a bad day - Loss of dependency management. Now you can't tell whether your environment has the right packages installed, nor can other things express a dependency on your code being installed - Very difficult to remove packages for upgrades/maintenance/security fixes Packages: - Host your own repo, removing the need for external dependencies (can do this with source as well, but it's much better when packages know to discover themselves from a repository) - Much cleaner rollback -- almost impossible to trash a system with apt-get/yum, they'll always leave you in a good state in case the package fails to install, or other mayhem ensues