Nick Pezza

When Action Cable was introduced, running Redis in production became the norm. On top of that, many apps also relied on Redis for caching and background jobs. But with the introduction of Solid Queue and Solid Cache, Redis became almost optional. Almost.

With Rails 8, Solid Cable became part of the Solid family, making it possible to deploy many Rails apps to production without Redis.

In this talk, we’ll explore Solid Cable’s internals, why it was created, and how it compares to the other Action Cable adapters. We’ll look at its performance characteristics, when to use it, when not to, and how it has evolved since it was added to Rails 8. We’ll also look to the future of realtime Rails apps in the age of LLM interfaces, where ordered message delivery becomes increasingly important.