A company wants to improve the availability of its application with a solution that requires minimal effort in the event a server needs to be replaced or added. Which of the following would be the best solution to meet these objectives?

Load balancing is the best solution because it distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that no single server becomes a bottleneck and improving application availability. If a server fails or needs replacement, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to the remaining healthy servers, requiring minimal manual intervention. Adding new servers is also straightforward, as the load balancer can be configured to include them in the distribution pool. Fault tolerance aims to prevent service interruption by providing redundant components, but it doesn't inherently simplify server replacement or addition in the same way load balancing does for scaling out. Proxy servers act as intermediaries for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers, offering security and caching benefits but not primarily focused on distributing load or simplifying server management for availability. Replication involves creating and maintaining multiple copies of data, which is crucial for data availability and disaster recovery, but it doesn't directly address the distribution of application traffic across servers for improved availability and ease of replacement.