I mean, you're basically setting up a datacenter if you aren't using Beanstalk.
I see complaints all the time about how complicated the networking is, IAM, etc is. But it's far more simple dealing with VPCs then having to buy and hop onto a bunch of F5s/Brocades etc that tend to require their own network engineers on staff.
The issue always seems to be that someone tries to move a company onto AWS but they lack the experience in actually running infrastructure to that degree. If you know Change Management you can figure out Cloud Formation templates, if you don't you're likely completely lost and rolling out instances by hand. If you don't know any network engineering you're likely going to have issues with load balancers and VPCs.
You can really see the experience difference in people when you work on multiple AWS infrastructures. And that's the huge benefit to it. You can practically roll out whatever sort of infrastructure your business requires.
If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc).
I personally use Cloud Formation and create EVERYTHING by it. Load balancers, VPCs, instances, kubernetes, etc. But yeah, if you haven't touched CF before it can be like walking into a spider web of confusion - but believe me, I'd rather do that over again than take over someones hardware that has no APIs, no dashboards, no centralization. I spent years in datacenters where everything was done manually. I wouldn't ever want to go back now that I've learned to treat infrastructure as code.
But hey, if you want to run Vsphere servers, manually configure instances and databases and not do any automation via AWS you can do that as well.
That's why it's incredible.