Really great post. When I was at AWS, we did everything with IaC but that luxury of time and investment is not avail to many. We're working on this problem but ensuring that devs has a) full transparency what's going on, b) ability to evolve their arch and c) building right on your AWS account. We just moved someone from Heroku to AWS handling 1B requests/day at 1/4 of the cost.
have a bunch of AWS execs backing us too; they know this is a problem.
Happy to chat more if you want to give it a spin: tinystacks.com
cloud is a marketing scam. It is sold to execs as a magic black box that scales and you don't have to be concerned with how it works internally. In reality it's a set of leaky abstractions and you absolutely have to understand how black box works internally plus be aware of thousands of bizarre hard/soft limits and other gotchas.
have a bunch of AWS execs backing us too; they know this is a problem. Happy to chat more if you want to give it a spin: tinystacks.com