I am about to deploy my 1st Rails app. I am stuck as I don't know what exactly I need to do. I know about Heroku, AWS, Capistrano and the like, but don't know exactly what they do, and what their benefits are.
I kinda know some things, but all are blurry and ambiguous since I have no formal training and learn as I go. So basically I need someone to explain the general anatomy of Rails deployment.
Something like: 'To make any app working on the web you need the following components... Ways to make this component work with Rails are following. Alternatives are these. These are pros and cons.' Not into too much detail, but general and comprehensive 101 guide.
The reason you may be confused is that there are a number of ways to do it. :D
Heroku provides one of the easiest solutions for basic deployments. You don't need capistrano, just git. (they provide a toolset to assist). Just git push heroku master. Also nice is that a simple deployment on heroku is free; you can pay for more power when you actually need it.
But if you need a little extra functionality that heroku can't provide, you have to host elsewhere, such as a private virtual host.
Capistrano is a set of recipes that help build a deployment environment, sort of like rake tasks. It does so in a very organized manner and allows for easy rollbacks. You define the hosts, their roles, and then the recipes use ssh and scp to set up the evironment. (the server also has to be ready to accept rails applications, through something like passenger)