[nlitened]

> it can make balancing the WebSocket connections a bit more challenging since they are long lived. Deployments are even more inconvenient since (in our case) we disconnect the WebSocket consumers whenever a server is restarted

May I suggest that the solution could be to design your WS protocol to be reconnect-friendly, like the Phoenix LiveView protocol? Maybe make a protocol which assumes and expects that a connection may be dropped by any side at any time, with robust context-restoration API such as “full snapshot” or “all updates since event ID”