I would also be interested in what would be the alternative not in the cloud? AWS deployments can get complicated due to the IAM rules, networking rules, security groups. But if I told someone, bring up a stack like that on bare metal, and make it repeatable what would that be?

For those of us that have worked on systems pre-cloud it does feel sometimes that it was easier in the past. But if you went to explain to someone new what to do, you realize how much you are taking for granted the knowledge and effort involved. Also the long term maintenance.