You can invest more time up front and automate it with an IAC tool and and CI tool to build/deploy. Probably nothing will be as hands off as Heroku, but there are lots of measures that can get you closer.
It is more configuration, yes, but it's far less than say ec2 and nomad. We run a very light production load on it and in 6 months I've had to intervene once (to bump our limits because we spiked slightly more than I expected us to)
I think AWS App Runner (+ Aurora Serverless) could be even better. From what I can tell, App Runner is supposed to be the successor to Elastic Beanstalk and AWS's PaaS offering. App Runner seems a little immature right now (it launched last year and was missing some key features on launch), but it is actively being developed.
I've always been hugely disappointed that AWS doesn't have a better PaaS offering, given Heroku's languishing, and I was hugely disappointed when App Runner launched and was missing some key features... but there is at least a little hope that it's improving.
Indeed. I wrote about recreating what I wanted from Heroku within ECS Fargate. There was a lot of initial configuration but very, very low maintenance work.
I wanna spend literally zero hours a month on server / dev ops, if I can manage it. I will pay for it and accept the constraints of simplicity.