I’m Blown Away by Kamal

My Previous Deployment Choices Since I mostly do web development using Ruby on Rails, these were my go-to options for deployment: PaaS like Heroku, Render, or Railway Serverless setups (Cloud Run + NeonDB) Honestly, I didn’t have any major complaints. PaaS costs a bit more, but in return, you get a clean UI and dead-simple workflows like GitHub integration. If the cost bothered me, I’d just go serverless. For my personal servers—where huge traffic isn't exactly a concern—going serverless meant the app would just sleep when inactive, allowing me to run services for around 50 yen a month. Compared to the headache of clicking through complex AWS or GCP dashboards to piece things together based on architecture diagrams, it was a walk in the park. I was perfectly content. Seriously. Kamal Became the Default in Rails 8 Everything changed when Rails 8 dropped. I heard they adopted Kamal as the official deployment tool. Kamal — Deploy web apps anywhere From bare metal to cloud VMs using Docker, deploy web apps anywhere with zero downtime. kamal-deploy.org Kamal? Is deploying really going to get any easier? I mean, I’m doing completely fine right now, though... That’s what I thought. But once I gave it a shot, it felt like being struck by lightning. This is an absolute game-changer. All you have to do is run rails new , throw your server's IP address into deploy.yml , and run kamal setup . That’s it—your app is deployed. For every release after that, it's just kamal deploy . I couldn't believe how simple the deployment workflow was. # deploy.yml service : my-app image : my-user/my-app servers : web : - 192.0.2.1 # Just swap in your VPS IP address here proxy : ssl : true host : app.example.com # Set up your domain here Sure, you have to bring your own server, but Kamal prides itself on being able to deploy absolutely anywhere. I rented a couple of VPS instances from Hetzner for about $10 a month each to host SuperRails and LazyCafe . From what I looked into, you can't really