The text discusses the benefits of upgrading from Node.js v6 to v8 for Ably Realtime, a distributed pub/sub messaging platform. Following the upgrade, latencies became more consistent and global infrastructure server costs decreased by almost 40%. The company uses various technologies in its real-time stack, including Elixir, Go, and Node.js. While they do not often choose Node.js for new services, it serves them well in their core routing and front-end layers. They emphasize the importance of choosing technologies with strong community support to ensure continuous performance optimization. The text also mentions other technologies Ably Realtime uses, such as gRPC, Cassandra, and Golang.