Exactly my thoughts... this is for toy projects.
It's 2016 and we have proper tools like PM2 [0], StrongPM [1], or even better, Serverless [2] (this is only for AWS but sooo cool) ...
- The article uses systemd for process monitoring rather than PM2 since it's built into the OS.
- The article uses HAProxy as a load balancer.
- Ansible playbooks, Dockerfiles, and the AWS API are all mentioned in the opening section of the article. Serverless sounds fine too. Personally I use http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/firework-0.pn... which I made using the AWS API. Either way, you will need some logic to capture inside these tools. Rather than write an article on Dockerfiles, Ansible playbooks, or the AWS or DO APIs, the article covers the devops basics one needs to know before using these tools.
'Use ${TOOL}' doesn't help you create or understand the contents of ${TOOL}s Dockerfile.
Many tools are popular because they provide powerful and convenient abstractions. For many folks, it's all about saving time (and therefore money). There's value in leaving the underlying working internals to specialists (that's why we don't need to understand the linux In-kernel API when we use Ubuntu Server's networking)
However many developers wish to have more control over their environment than what a PaaS provides, and a lot of the tools they'd use for that - Ansible, Docker, etc - require basic DevOps skills.
[replying from old account due to rate limit]