Good article. One thing I would add is the necessity to include failures/unhappy path scenarios in your load scripts. See if all that logging/tracing really is free :)

Slightly off topic: do people still run any load/performance tests on cloud hosted sites? it seems like spiking your aws load is becoming prohibitively expensive. Also, in the real world replacing third party services with some intelligent mocks(simulating failures and latency) can be super complex.