You don’t need Kubernetes: Scaling API Layers without the theatrics

We containerised because Docker gave us clean, consistent shipping and deployment without drama. But we drew a hard line between containerisation as a deployment tool and orchestration as a scaling strategy. That distinction matters more than most teams realise before they have already committed to the heavier path. This talk walks through how we scaled a production .NET financial system and its API layer without over-provisioning or container orchestration, using what the .NET ecosystem already gives you before reaching for anything exotic. We will cover how we identified where the real bottl