The goal of this milestone is to introduce the idea of portable releases to Engine Yard environments. This is similar to the notion of "slugs" that one would see in other PaaS offerings (with both the benefits and likely the warts thereof).

So far as benefits go on our platform, here are a few examples:

• Shipping a single file from the primary app server to the other servers in an environment is significantly more efficient than shipping a boatload of files.
• Assets are built in exactly one place, so there's no more asset skew.
• ALL heavy lifting to create a new build of the application happens on one server, allowing the other servers to continue handling requests while the build is in progress.