Set up large baremetal so that you don't have to scale for a long time and by the time you do, you have had your first million users and you can afford spending for inanely complex infra and don't care about aws billing anymore. Set up user services with systemctl, access your logs through journalctl, change your configs with rsync. And op was arguing against the cloud so giving cloud examples is beside the point. No need for all the sass.