Point I was making is that pulling out process's/servers/cables is all fine (aka pissing on your server) but it is not a ideal way to test. It is better IMHO to test out on what you could call weak hardware, as in realy throttled CPU/disc/network etc and see were things break as these emulate what potentual peak bottlenecks you will get. This approach is better as you get to test out a single process system as apposed to only being able to test cloud based approaches as this does.
Throttling CPU/disc/network is all well and fine and necessary too, but that's only one set of failure scenarios, and won't protect you against a whole range of failures related to systems just disappearing as they crash, or failing to restart, or any number of other concerns.
I personaly like to run stuff on a CPU/network crippled test setup as that can expose cracks normal testing fails to highlight and in a way that is indicative of what can actualy happen under some load spikes.