This talk will guide you through the various different aspects of building distributed applications with Ruby. While this talk will not do a deep dive into any technology we will look at libraries that ship with Ruby, such as DRb and Rinda, as well as other 3rd party libraries that are available, during the discussion and examples. We'll talk about remote method invocation (RMI), message queues, asynchronous tasks, map reduce, and background jobs, just to name a few. The discussion will include what those terms all mean and when and where you may want to use a particular technology.