Agree. Ditto not having drunk the Kool-aid on automated testing, as long as you have a viable alternative to achieve the same end (although I will admit that I find the idea of great monitoring and automated rollbacks a bit stressful on the face of it; you could mitigate that with good discipline around releases though).

You instrument your application so you discover failures very quickly. If you do this right, you pretty much get the reporting people want from business intelligence applications, and use that as your core monitoring metric.

It's a lot less stressful if something goes wrong, because you can go to a previous release in a couple of minutes.

I wanted to point that out as well. Especially since the OP is familiar with Ruby it's really not a thing to get wound up about.

Compared to Python and Ruby, Perl might be getting a little long in the tooth but there's probably stuff that's less of a hassle to in Perl than in any of its decendants.

Certainly no red flag.