FWIW, if you do need ELB support right away (and keep in mind that you'll have to look at it from each server's point of view), you can probably use https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/aws (and use the elastic_lb resource), and hook it into your own cookbook for setting up whatever ELB's you want (then set up your custom cookbook repo for your stack.)

(I'm trying to say that this platform is incredibly flexible, and you can reuse what's already out there. If you need support for X, Y, or Z, then you can likely write in support with Chef.)

Not only that, but there's no allowance made for micros either.

Also, SSL on a per-app basis is confusing me - does that mean that each box individually is handling SSL termination, or is it done on the loadbalancer side? I have a lot of reading to do before I can really understand what's happening here I think

The lack of micro instance is a real shame. I suspect that's because the time taken to do a full chef install run on a micro might be vast.

I've used t1.micros extensively with chef -- it's not as bad as you might think.

ssl is handled on app basis not in the load balancer and by the way, you can hook into everything by rewriting or overwriting the recipes

That's what I figured. It seems odd that they'd be enforcing that approach from the start, though