thank you for doing this, I was just about to slog through figuring this out for myself using most of these tools. This will save me a lot of trial and error!

Small plug, I wrote a node wrapper for digital ocean's API. https://github.com/hortinstein/brinydeep It would be interesting to use it to auto-scale based on feedback from haproxy or the nodes themselves when smashing it with siege.

When i get around to it I might write a followup to your article incorporating that and some of the other features!