Play is a web development framework. It has the capability to run standalone using it's built in http server or it can output a .WAR file that can be run under containers like Tomcat.
and play 2.1+ can serve https as well http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.2.x/Configuring.... In practice, play instances are behind a front end server such as nginx for load balancing, https, caching, and virtual hosting. Play's convention for stateless sessions makes it really attractive to scale by adding more instances to the node balancer.
http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.2.x/Production