No, we don’t use Kubernetes

At Ably, we run a large-scale production infrastructure that powers our customers' real-time messaging applications worldwide using Docker containers. Despite Kubernetes being the most widely known system for orchestrating containerized software, we do not currently use it nor plan to in the near future. Our current setup involves running on EC2 instances and leveraging AWS services like Network Load Balancers and CloudFront for traffic ingress. We believe that introducing Kubernetes would merely move some of our problems around instead of actually solving them. While Kubernetes has its benefits, such as resource management and traffic ingress, it also comes with added costs and complexity. For now, we are focusing on improving other aspects of our infrastructure to ensure reliability, low latency, and high availability for our users.