If I banned "cloud" and "virtualization" from your vocabulary, would you still be able to communicate?

I never understood what starting up more boxes could do for you. I mean, how can you benefit from having more boxes without IP and DNS-based load balancing? How can you coordinate things so your new units -- databases, web servers, etc -- are useful without doing an awful lot of messing about in the configuration of the whole? And even if you could, can you really spread database load and web server load without introducing the same DNS-based (and really quite unreliable) load balancing Amazon are finally offering here as real IP-layer solutions?

Somebody is just going to have to clue me in a bit. I just don't understand what use there is for automatic scaling. Sorry. :-)

Cheers,

Sabahattin