I'm just not sure how you define what goes into that zip in a way that does not make it substantially harder to solve tough problems than it would be to be fami

I'm just not sure how you define what goes into that zip in a way that does not make it substantially harder to solve tough problems than it would be to be familiar with cloud services. Of course it'll cover you up to a point. If it's a CRUD web app that runs on a single server (or multiple stateless ones) and uses a relational database, you can have a zip file whose contents cover your needs. But if you have anything that justifies Kafka, Cassandra, or distributed storage, the "I'll just throw it over the fence to ops" paradigm isn't likely to fit as well.