Let's be blunt: Most web apps aren’t so computation-heavy and won't hit scaling issues. What if yours is the exception? Can Rails handle it? Cue Exhibit A: Cloudinary, which serves billions of image and video requests daily, including on-the-fly edits, QUICKLY, running on Rails since Day 1. Case closed? Not so fast. Beyond the app itself, we needed creative solutions to ensure that, as traffic rises and falls at the speed of the internet, we handle the load gracefully, and no customer overwhelms the system. The real question isn't whether Rails is up to the challenge, but rather: Are you?