Simulacra and Network Virtualization: Does cloud load-balancing work for long-lived TCP streams?

The text discusses the challenges faced by Mux's Live Streaming API when using Google Cloud's Network Load Balancer for managing non-HTTP connections, particularly long-lived TCP flows such as RTMP. It explains how they discovered that virtual load balancers don't always simulate their physical counterparts as expected and how this led to occasional disconnects in live streaming. The solution proposed was to integrate the existing health checking system with a traditional L4 load-balancing setup using Envoy, which resulted in improved connection reliability.