You're missing out big time using the traditional deployment model on AWS. If you instead use an deployment model that includes an elastic load balancer you get a ton of benefits:
1) it automatically replaces dead instances.
2) it can automatically scale up if needed
3) lots of free monitoring graphs, etc
4) highly available = the load balancer never fails (unlike wotaskd and pals)
For simplicity I recommend using elastic beanstalk and deploying a WAR file. But you could also build a docker image and deploy a traditional app instead (using beanstalk), but without the cruft of wotaskd and javamonitor.
In the long term - the AWS container service is in beta and allows deploying docker images across a fleet of EC2 instances. This the best model for deploying WO apps since you typically want to have multiple app processes running on each machine rather than a single monolithic process (which is what WAR deployment gives you).