There's still order of magnitude change analogies to real world processes, if people are willing to listen (which is the hard part). Use something that everybody can understand, like making pancakes or waffles or an omelet. Going from making 1 by hand, every 4 minutes at home for your family, to 1,000 pancakes per minute at a factory is obviously going to take a better system. You can scale horizontally, and do the equivalent of putting more VMs behind the load balancer, and hire 4,000+ people to cook, but you still need to have/make that load balancer in the first place for even that to work.

That's the tip of iceberg when going from 1 per 4 minutes to 1,000 per minute though. How do you make and distribute enough batter for that system, and plating and serving that is going to take a pub/sub bus, err, conveyor belt to support the cooks' output. Again though, you still gotta make that kafka queue, err, conveyor belt, plus the maintenance for that is going to a team of people if you need the conveyor belt to operate 24/7/52. If your standards are so high that the system can never go down for more than 52.6 minutes per year or 13.15 minutes per quarter, then that team needs to consist of highly-trained and smart (read: expensive) people to call when the system breaks in the middle of the night.