What is Kubernetes?
This feature is currently in beta. It should not be used for production libraries.
Kubernetes (or "Kube") is a new way that ArupCompute is hosting libraries that is currently in beta.
With this new Kubernetes-based infrastructure, your libraries run inside Docker containers that are orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes. Messages are sent to and from your library via a queue (Azure Service Bus). All libraries have one inbound queue and once received by your calculation, are routed to the correct calc. Instances of your library are scaled based on the number of messages in this queue.
This setup makes it much easier to automatically manage your libraries. For example, when a library is under heavy load, additional compute resources can be allocated dynamically to handle incoming calculation requests.
The purpose of this change to provide a better technical foundation for scenarios where you are running longer running calcs or larger numbers in parallel. You should consider Kubernetes when:
- You are running C# (Python is currently not supported)
- You have calcs that may take more than 420 seconds (Azure functions time-out if a response is not returned in this time-frame)
- You are expecting very high number parallel calls - we have tested this architecture up to 6 million simultaneous calcs (however additional changes will be required before we can unlock this)
- You would like to run big async compute jobs in the future.
Currently, you should notice little difference in day-to-day usage of your calculations but the team is still actively improving and iterating. As of April 2026 this feature is in beta and continually evolving and undergoing testing at scale. For this reason we recommend not porting or deploying to Kube mode for production workloads without reaching out to the ArupCompute platform team. This will likely change over the next two months.