The approaches described in the article are clever and the results are impressive, so kudos to the team!

However, while reading, it felt weird that they treated Skipper as a third-party dependency, even though it is developed and operated by their colleagues. I mean, they could've tried contributing some updates and improvements to Skipper, maybe reusing Skipper's discovery mechanism, instead of rolling out their own, completely independent LB module.

And yes, it's true that in big companies it can be hard to organise cross-team collaboration, but IMO it's still worth a try.