There was an older blog post about deploying Seaside (a SmallTalk web app framework) on AWS. It boiled down to stripping the image of unused parts (tree shaking), including the GUI and copying the images over to the server behind a load balancer. Sorry for the lack of details, I can't find that particular article. This looks like it might answer the questions: https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/EnterprisePharoBo...

The image is the compiled bytecode. There is no source in there. The source code is in the PharoXX.sources files and .changes files.

Deploying is easy, it is as any executable with some dlls and resources.

I deploy web apps on Azure with Windows 2012 R2 server and run them with NSSM so that they are nice services.

Otherwise, I run them on Linux with monit or supervisord.

As for scaling, well, you can run a bunch of running VMs with a load balancer in front.

An option is to use GsDevToolkit because Gemstone can run Pharo code and scale quite far.

A lot of apps do not need the scaling actually. So, 4 or 5 VM instances can really go a long way.

The simplest thing is to prepare your image and copy it where you want it to run. It's like sculpting your software, actually