GP was talking about pre-docker deployments. You could totally deploy immutable Rails AMIs without both Docker and Capistrano.

AMIs were still pretty novel at the time I started (around 2007 like the GP). The standard deployment in the blogs/books was using Capistrano to scp the app over to like a VPS (we did colo) and then run monit or god to reboot the mongrels. We have definitely improved imho!

Totally, around that time I did that too (although I was working with LAMP stacks so no Capistrano), but with the rise of AWS, Capistrano got outdated. I know that not everyone jumped board on cloud that early, and even the ones that did, there was an adaptation period where EC2 machines were treated just like colo machines. But Ruby also used to be the hipster thing before 2010 so... :)

Anyway, never liked Capistrano so I'm probably biased