> Hell, I can't even get a normal Digital Ocean server instance to programmatically drop and recreate doing minimal things like creating a user and setting SSH keys. I suppose if I wanted to learn something heavyweight like Chef or Puppet I could, but for now, I just maintain a list of commands to run, and understand that Digital Ocean servers can't quite be treated like livestock just yet, though I can fake it pretty well. Eventually Digital Ocean will get around to making the platform changes, which are all already in feature request.
It sounds like you might benefit from Cloud-config for droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...
Or have you tried that already? It's also available through their API, BTW.