> Easier said than done. To implement that I will probably need to hire a DevOps guy, and now we have all this cloud formation (or whatever your infra as code choice is) code to manage now. So in reality it probably costs more (devops and more code to manage) than if I just went with a couple cheaper bare metal servers.
This does not make any sense. You don't need cloudformation or anything, you can just use a wizard and provision as many VMs (baremetal or otherwise) as you need. It's literally a form and next -> next -> next.
Now that you have systems you can login to, their complexity is the same – except you won't have to care, or manage any hardware.
You still have to manage those systems yourself. Keep them patched, secure, and the workloads up. It's your choice whether or not to delve deeper into the AWS ecosystem.
Note that even though I said you don't need cloudformation (actually just use Terraform instead), you have a lot of power at your disposal if you do. You can't automate racking and stacking of physical servers, but you can fully automate the lifecycle of a cluster of VMs. At my job I can bring up a 40+ cluster containing many kinds of workloads, with a single butotn press. And destroy it just as easily (for non-prod). That's invaluable.