I think you are right, except that the article reads as if they were using a loadbalancer that wasn't in their control (a third-party service). If you can't con

I think you are right, except that the article reads as if they were using a loadbalancer that wasn't in their control (a third-party service). If you can't control your loadbalancer to not pass requests when you're overloaded, the next best thing is to keep track of it on each node, and basically do what the article described.