Great article, and fun to see what is going on inside. We used a similar strategy with great success at my last company (though we were using Passenger).<p>Once you've nailed the zero-downtime deployment, it's a short hop to adding a small box (or a script on your test server) to do continuous integration and then moving from there to continuous deployment. For our small team this setup was really liberating.<p>If you head down that path, I'd love to see updates on what your team's experience is with that transition.