If I had a Rails application requiring MySQL and Redis that I wanted to host myself, this is the quickest and most simple approach. There are just 2 dependencies: Ansible & Docker. To make the introductions:

Meet Ansible, a system orchestration tool. It has no dependencies other than python and ssh. It doesn’t require any agents to be set up on the remote hosts and it doesn’t leave any traces after it runs either. What’s more, it comes with an extensive, built-in library of modules for controlling everything from package managers to cloud providers, to databases and everything else in between. If you’ve spent more time writing cookbooks rather than using them, Ansible will be your cure.

Meet Docker, a utility for creating virtualized Linux containers for shipping self-contained applications. As opposed to a traditional VM which runs a full-blown operating system on top of the host...