There is no shared state on the server between those requests. The only shared state is the session (cookie/encoded in the markup).

One thing to consider is that Elixir/Erlang/the BEAM natively supports clustering. Whether your multiple pods form a cluster from Elixir’s point of view depends on your configuration.

For the LiveView socket state, it is as you started your reasoning: client request reaches your Kubernetes ingress, eventually reaches a Bandit/Cowboy web server in one of the pods, the server returns the “disconnected” rendered HTML, the browser runs JS which connects the socket - it may land on any pod - the server upgrades the connection gets to a WebSocket and the LiveView process and state lives in this pod that served the second “connected” request.

If you have the BEAM setup as a cluster, then processes on different pods can communicate, and for example exchange messages through PubSub.

The state of the initial mount is lost after the render completes, this is the same as a request to a controller. The js then initiates the new request which will become the websocket connection managed by the liveview process on the server. For recovery after a disconnect it will first build the initial state again in mount, then there is code that will resent the form content if any to update the state on the server.