Is civicrm-buildkit safe to use in production?
Buildkit is not designed for production use but I can't think of any reason it can't be used that way. As your second question suggests, the upgrade procedure will indeed be different. Steps for upgrading on a buildkit install would be:


Backup your database
Do a git checkout tagname &amp;&amp; git pull for all 3 git repos (civicrm-core, civicrm-packages &amp; civicrm-yourcms).
Run setup.sh with the correct arguments to regenerate code and download dependencies.
Run the upgrader (can do this from the command line as well)


You'll probably want to create a little script to do this for you.