Context:

I've tried rubber gem, but that does not fulfill my requirements ( I needed to deploy on existing instance, so don't recommend me rubber)

So, I followed this excellent tutorial http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15535140/installing-ruby-2-0-and-rails-4-0-0beta-on-aws-ec2

Now, I have ruby 2.0 and rails 4.0.0 running on AWS EC2.

I successfully ran the server with RDS (mysql) as db and default webrick as server ( Using command rails server )

But, I've read that webrick is a development server and shouldn't be used at production.

What I tried:

I googled and came up with some alternatives.

1. Capistrano

2. Nginx / apache with passenger

3. Passenger with Capistrano

4. Unicorn

5. Puma

My Question:

1. What exactly is capistrano / passenger ? Are they middleware to ease my deployment process ? I don't see any difficulty in doing rails server command. If they are just middleware, nginx with passenger and capistrano does not make any sense ? Why would I add a learning curve ( to learn nginx, passenger and capistrano configs) just to run my server ? I can just use nginx to deploy my app. Can't I ?

2. What combination should I use on Amazon EC2 (or may be at any some other production server).