This is not the way it is deployed inside of Netflix. The scripts were collaborated by Kenzan and Google to make it easy to try and install Spinnaker. There is also a docker-compose configuration to make it easy to try. Internally, we deploy each microservice to a separate aws intance that is heavily monitored.

Grails 2 does change the reloading agent to a custom one from SpringSource compared to previous versions - https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-loaded . Hopefully that does take away much of the code reloading woes.

Also, you are not restricted to hibernate since the GORM stuff has been refactored and now supports new hotnesses like MongoDB and Redis - https://github.com/SpringSource/grails-data-mapping