The original intended use for AWS was to be additional capacity for existing non cloud setups during spikes. Things like investment firms and algorithmic tradin

The original intended use for AWS was to be additional capacity for existing non cloud setups during spikes. Things like investment firms and algorithmic trading setups that cost money during downtime. They found a larger market in being the full infrastructure, so they started down the road to cloud appliances making it easy for any average Joe to spin up infra. This was in ec2 classic era before VPC was a thing. So your active/passive setup description is actually using AWS appropriately based on it's original ideas.