Ever since the Play framework came onto the scene, I’ve been sold on the idea of containerless deployment. The old model of a bunch of apps deployed in a single container sharing resources and Java EE components just never really materialized. Thanks to the thriving Grails plugin community, we have the Standalone App Runner plugin that makes containerless deployment dead simple for Grails apps. But what would you be giving up in terms of performance if you move away from a commercial enterprise-y app server like WebLogic in favor of embedded Tomcat or Jetty? As it turns out, absolutely nothing.