I am personally working through deploying on bare metal cloud servers using Ansible and yes, it is challenging to build a full-fledged server with a reverse proxy, local data store, OpenTelelmetry collector, and my JVM app backend -- then secure the server, share keys, run all the services, export logs, open an entry points for a CI deployment, manage env variables, etc. Dokku is an option but has its limits.
The benefit, of course, is that I can rent bare VPS's with redundancy for a year for less $ than most managed services charge per month. If your service made JVM deployments easy while keeping costs low, you might have this market all to yourself.