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Unfortunately many of these super-complicated systems run at odds to having a reliable and fast, system even when every second of downtime can be translated into lost money.

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Realistically, they are required. I don't care how you do it, but you need 1. Seamless fail overs 2. Easy horizontal scaling 3. Location based load balancing 4. A way to deploy and rollback all of these automatically. As a result, things are gonna get complicated no matter what you do. But as it turns out, using something like Kubernetes, Elixir, or AppEngine can make all of that very manageable.

#3 is debatable for many, many businesses. The other three are (almost) trivial with a decent load balancer and blue/green deployments. This is something very achievable without an over-complicated architecture.

3 is incredibly important for global businesses. You ever try using a Japanese website?

As for how "easy" the others are, the truth is that the options I provided will be easier to make, easier to maintain, and work better than your home grown solution once you need to account for multiple machines.

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