There's a big chance the interfaces you have to develop for your application layer will be different for several apps. One way to have a generic approach for this is building more abstraction.
If you are using PHP as the backed then you are most likely going to have your webservers and "application" servers on the same machine (Apache + php) so the diagram from amazon doesn't really apply in this case. One thing that you may want to look into is putting a machine in front of your webservers (nginx or the like) to reverse proxy the requests back to your webservers, or maybe look into ELB from amazon.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.