The current challenge in deploying a fast and responsive Rails application is not only optimizing queries, caching views, and reducing network latency between users and servers, but also ensuring that the database can be replicated across multiple regions to reduce latency. To achieve this, developers need to set up multi-region databases with read-only replicas, configure connections to these replicas, and implement automatic connection switching to direct reads to the nearest replica. Additionally, they must address potential issues such as replication lag and reading one's own writes by leveraging Rails middleware and selectively connecting to the closest database replica based on the application's region.