Jesus christ. "Stick a load balancer in front of it and scale horizontally" works _precisely_ as well for a monolithic app as it does for a microservice. Which

Jesus christ. "Stick a load balancer in front of it and scale horizontally" works _precisely_ as well for a monolithic app as it does for a microservice. Which is to say, it might work, to some degree, to some total load, for some systems, and it might not for others, and will eventually break down at high enough load for pretty much anything that's not a pure function (e.g. you could scale a RESTful javascript linter horizontally presumably forever with more load balancers and more api servers, but your chat system is going to get more complex)