It’s unlikely there’s anyone in IT today that doesn’t understand the role of load balancing to scale. Whether cloud or not, load balancing is the key mechanism through which load is distributed to ensure horizontal scale of applications. It’s also unlikely there’s anyone in IT that doesn’t understand the relationship between load balancing and high-availability (reliability). High-Availability (HA) architectures are almost always implemented using load balancing services to ensure seamless transition from one service instance to another in the event of a failure.
What’s often overlooked is that scalability and HA isn’t important just for applications. Services – whether application or network-focused – must also be reliable. It’s the old “only as strong as the weakest link in the chain” argument. An application is only as reliable as its least reliable component – and that includes services and infrastructure upon which that application relies. It is – or should be – ops first rule; the rule that guides design of data center architectures.