I don't think that Ruby/Rails has anything to do with this, really. If you want to scale any app, you're going to want to do some caching somewhere. What this b

I don't think that Ruby/Rails has anything to do with this, really. If you want to scale any app, you're going to want to do some caching somewhere. What this boils down to is that their app has a dependency in an initializer that depends on redis. Without a connection to redis, it will flap.