It is not going against the grain. Using release upgrades (upgrading a release without restarting the VM -- unless the version of erts has changed) should only be used where necessary and they rarely are.

They are great to have when you need them but should not be chosen lightly.

Part of the point of this booksite is to show integrating Erlang into a modern environment and not being the oddball deploy at the company. It is the lack of libraries for services used for deployment/monitoring and lack of documentation that is the reason for this.

Also, there is no abstracting away network partitions.