the article offers a simplified world model: Poisson arrivals and infinite queue, which is fine as a math model.
In the real world however, the bursts can be correlated, due to factors like timeouts/retries, thundering herd, correlated bursts.
so the real economics of load-balanced system is a simple reliability story: being able to reasonably serve the peak traffic, which leads to over-provisioning of those systems.
using cloud allows some form of scale up/down of resources, but doesn't completely solve the problem. I think the migration away from synchronyous systems towards async systems and letting clients gradually absorb the delays is a better approach (rather than forcing infrastructure to be dynamically scaled up/down and be billed per request-second by your cloud provider)
In the real world however, the bursts can be correlated, due to factors like timeouts/retries, thundering herd, correlated bursts.
so the real economics of load-balanced system is a simple reliability story: being able to reasonably serve the peak traffic, which leads to over-provisioning of those systems.
using cloud allows some form of scale up/down of resources, but doesn't completely solve the problem. I think the migration away from synchronyous systems towards async systems and letting clients gradually absorb the delays is a better approach (rather than forcing infrastructure to be dynamically scaled up/down and be billed per request-second by your cloud provider)