Well, whether you have a single loadbalancer, a single uplink, a single upstream router or a single datacenter is not really relevant. Unless you go full distributed (across multiple data centers) those things are from a risk perspective almost equivalent. I don't think the loadbalancer ever broke but even if it had it would not have been the end of the world.
What matters is that you stay away from complexity as long as you can't afford to expend your time, energy and funds on it.
Would strongly disagree with this. Not all parts of your entire stack are equal. It is far, far more likely that your application tier is likely to fall over or say suffer a full GC than your load balancer falling over. You've also eliminated the ability to do rolling restarts and many other redundancy activities.
Staying away from complexity is one thing. But only if you are running some toy site.
No, that means you're not following my logic. Hot-swapping power supplies and/or drives obviously improves you reliability (assuming you don't configure for speed but for redundancy). But they're not a guarantee against data-loss, only off-site back-ups that you test are a guarantee for that.
After all, if you controller goes on the blink your precious raid could easily die with it.
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Well, whether you have a single loadbalancer, a single uplink, a single upstream router or a single datacenter is not really relevant. Unless you go full distributed (across multiple data centers) those things are from a risk perspective almost equivalent. I don't think the loadbalancer ever broke but even if it had it would not have been the end of the world.
What matters is that you stay away from complexity as long as you can't afford to expend your time, energy and funds on it.
And if you have to then go for it.
Would strongly disagree with this. Not all parts of your entire stack are equal. It is far, far more likely that your application tier is likely to fall over or say suffer a full GC than your load balancer falling over. You've also eliminated the ability to do rolling restarts and many other redundancy activities.
Staying away from complexity is one thing. But only if you are running some toy site.
What about RAID? If I follow your logic, you're claiming that by adding more harddrives to a RAID cluster I'm increasing the risk of data loss?
No, that means you're not following my logic. Hot-swapping power supplies and/or drives obviously improves you reliability (assuming you don't configure for speed but for redundancy). But they're not a guarantee against data-loss, only off-site back-ups that you test are a guarantee for that.
After all, if you controller goes on the blink your precious raid could easily die with it.
Also known as common sense :)