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Maybe I'm missing something here, but what are the advantages of having two identical servers with a floating IP that switches between them instead of just running two instances of the app on the same server and switching between them by editing the nginx proxy config?

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So you can do maintenance/kernel upgrades etc. on the server that's not in production at the moment.

Less work. You'd need to have a different context for environment variables that adds another level of complexity. Likewise if you had a dependency that needs updating (SSL, etc), you can do it safely on the idle machine without worrying about production traffic.

Eh, it's pretty trivial to do. The reason for 2 servers is high availability, not that it is easier in meaningful way.

I run something similar on personal site and it's literally just 2 identical configs but with different port/directory and some haproxy config.

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