Load balancers don't just do scale. They provide a separation of concerns, and for a "simple app" (i.e. the kind were talking about here), a vendor provided one

Load balancers don't just do scale. They provide a separation of concerns, and for a "simple app" (i.e. the kind were talking about here), a vendor provided one (AWS elb for example) is very easy to set up. Our LB does a bunch of heavy lifting for us. It handles SSL termination, static routing (we serve a bunch of content from S3), handles Auth for our internal "management" endpoints, and because we use containers it gives us health checks, auto restarts, and rolling deploys. I'm pretty sure we have about 30lines of terraform to support all of that.