I'm not sure running on AWS instead of on your own server is actually going down a turtle. I run pretty much everything myself, but that is mostly dealing with complexity which isn't very enlightening. Might very well be that someone who uses a provider gets a better understanding of infrastructure design.
Running on AWS is going up at least one turtle, possibly several if you're throwing configuration management and deployment tools into the mix.
AWS abstracts out bare-metal through Xen, deployment images, the AWS control panel, its monitoring, and the fact that you can't physically grab and yank the server should you want to.
On bare metal, you've removed most of those layers, though you have the option of putting most of them back in. I find the head for AWS vs. bare-metal admin to be quite different. Being old school, I prefer metal.
I'm just not sure that those layers are actually functional. I see little reason why things couldn't be more like AWS if there were standardized ways to e.g. configure things. A lot that one deals with is glue between the turtles and not necessarily the other turtle.
(A problem now is that the glue is nonstandardised, and you've got vendor-specific glue, much of it with craptacular Web interfaces, at various levels. We used to have this in other parts of the stack, but they eventually got commoditised, and those particular layers went away. If you haven't done it before, crack open a Sendmail.cf file. If you have done it before, I'm truly sorry for the flashbacks.)
