How does Rails handle real-time systems beyond ActionCable?

Rails integrates with external real-time systems like Kafka, WebSockets servers, and pub-sub brokers.

While ActionCable provides WebSockets, large-scale real-time systems often rely on external brokers like Kafka, Redis Pub/Sub, or NATS. Rails publishes events, and separate real-time services push updates to clients. This improves scalability and decouples real-time infrastructure from application logic.