Usually no. Sometimes, when you need to debug something, e.g network problem or run some tests - you do SSH, but solely for debugging purposes, and not for conf

Usually no. Sometimes, when you need to debug something, e.g network problem or run some tests - you do SSH, but solely for debugging purposes, and not for configuring / installing software. For VMs you build image with everything baked in (think packer) or use cloud-init and do that on the fly on top base Linux image. For other apps serverless or sort of k8s solution. Then Terraform or Pulumi to configure and push above to the cloud and maintain state.