Load Balancer Drupal Configure for Beginner

Very new to load balancing here and doing my research before making the plunge. Right now I have a single server running Drupal 7. It’s using complex mysql queries and hosts a large amount of user uploaded images. To prepare for the future and continued expansion I’m looking at the following setup. Wondering if this makes sense, and any suggestions on tools to get the job done:

##My thoughts here:

• lysncd to keep D7 application files matching
• DO load balancer
• Switching to NGINX for web service
• Sticky sessions: on
• HTTP/2 SSL Termination
• My bottle neck could still be the mysql server but I don’t think I’m ready for make a data cluster

##Quick Questions:

• Is it worth using GlusterFS instead of lsyncd? Best way to keep files synced if I need to add more application nodes?
• I may just run one application node, and boot up the second from a snapshot during peak volume times, thoughts on this approach?

##Looking for guidance here:

• The node attachments (99.9%) images can take up a lot of space, I’m thinking use S3 to host these files (the domain name isn’t that important for these). This would allow me to not worry about replicating files on both application nodes or worry about running out of storage on a small sized node. Any thoughts on this approach? I would have considered DO’s block storage, but it looks like it can only connect to one node at a time. How about a specific application node dedicated to file storage instead of S3?