Journal
Rails 8 in practice: what's worth adopting today
Solid Queue, Kamal, and the move toward boring, defaulted infrastructure — a field report from production.
The defaults finally win
For a decade the Rails community was told to swap out the defaults. Rails 8 flips that: the new defaults — Solid Queue, Solid Cache, Kamal — are genuinely production-grade.
rubyconfig.active_job.queue_adapter = :solid_queue config.cache_store = :solid_cache_store
No Redis. No sidekiq. No Kafka for a blog. The infrastructure that ships with the framework now covers the 90% case cleanly.
What we adopted
- ["Solid Queue for background jobs", "Propshaft for assets", "Importmap for JavaScript", "Kamal for deployment"]
The biggest win wasn't any single feature — it was the confidence that boring, defaulted infrastructure lets the team focus on product.