One of my new projects is a web-app for business (built on Rails). I've been fortunate to make some really good contacts who agreed to be beta testers (large corporate/franchise types).
One bit of feedback I received was that some companies may want their own instance of the app deployed behind a firewall.
Does anyone have any good ideas on how to implement this efficiently? Is there an easy to configure appliance that can run a linux distro and Rails stack? Is there any easy way it could pull updates?
Use VMWare Player with that image as the base, install your Rails app to it, and go from there. Then you can give your client the pre configured image and they can deploy it however they please.
That image is Engine Yard in a box, and Engine Yard is awesome. You