How much work is Arch?
 

I'm migrating a Rails app off of a PaaS provider onto a VPS. My plan is to get two servers, one for the DB (MySQL), and another for the app. I want to use Ansible for configuration and deployment both to document the setup, and also so I can scale up if need be for large batch jobs.

I'm more of a developer than a sysadmin, but I certainly know enough to be dangerous and have been using Linux on the server-side for a couple decades now, but mostly Debian/RedHat based distributions.

I like the idea of Arch because I would love a minimal and secure setup with low overhead and attack surface. However I'm concerned that it will be a time sink, and require a lot of fiddling and painful maintenance over the years (I expect to support this in my spare time for the next 5 years at least). Especially considering I'm used to the convenience of apt-get and yum, am I fool to consider Arch?

I choose Arch for all my (real, not hosted) systems that I need to run (and not fail) on my home network. Raspberry pi for firewall/router, NAS backup, photo collection (all separate systems) ...
Keep an eye on the news, and if they tell you to upgrade a package, do it. KDE5 was a serious PITA , but that was for everybody, not just Arch. Gawd I hate KDE devs (photo collection, else I would bin KDE).
Arch itself is rock solid. pacman (package manager) is on a par with yum and apt - have a look at this for a comparison. The Arch doco is unmatched - end of discussion.

Didn't answer the "time sink" issue. I kick off an update when I feel like it, rarely (never) have to follow up. No worse than Fedora/Mint/... whatever.