I got tired of all the high level discussion of how to build Ruby services, so I put together an actual bit of code that lets you build a Rack application using the Grape API layer, Roar representers, has built in support for ActiveRecord migrations apart from Rails, and a Mina deployment script that will put it on your server within 5 seconds.You can read the blog post and slides from my Windy City Rails talk here: http://devblog.reverb.com/post/61151763659/building-ruby-services-on-and-off-rails
or just jump straight to the code: github.com/reverbdev/service-skeleton