In my work as a Ruby on Rails developer, I usually encounter applications that run on environments using Terraform or some repeatable infrastructure manager. For Rails apps that need to scale this can be helpful since it provides a way to make fully independent (and repeatable) environments, or copies of your application, that can be “spun” up by the click of a button and destroyed just as easily. 

This is helpful in managing Cloud resources since as anyone who’s used AWS, Azure or Google Cloud can tell you, clicking through multiple screens to configure resources can lead to mistakes and orphaned paid resources that cost you money you didn’t want to spend.

Medium author @ajays871 posted a good writeup about how to go about getting a Rails app deployed using Terraform.

On the flip side, the provisioning of multiple resources across a Cloud provider can be overkill for many Rails side projects. For those apps there are still free and almost free options for hosting your app. Some can be cheaper than hosting a Wordpress or PHP site.