Sure, nothing is magic. And cloud is no different. It may remove barriers to deployment of infrastructure or application resources, but it can still be time consuming.
However, unlike a lot of physical resources, you generally have one or more ways to automate modern systems to do routine work for you.
Recently, I’ve completed work on an end-to-end automation for on-boarding new cloud resources for application deployment.
Through a combination of Terraform, Vault, Github, Github Actions, some third-party Actions, as well as some custom-written Actions and shell scripts in workflows, we now can go from dispatching a job with relatively few inputs such as who owns it, how many environments, et cetera, and within minutes all Github, Terraform, and Cloud resources are spun up for them to begin working with their own terraform for their application hosting resources.
What took hours of manual effort now takes minutes!