Capistrano, Ansible et al. have existed this whole time if you want to do that.

The real difference in approaches is between short lived environments that you redeploy from scratch all the time and long lived environments we nurse back to health with runbooks.

You can use lambda, kube, etc. or chef, puppet etc. but you end up at this same crossroad.

Just starting a process and keeping it alive for a long time is easy to get started with but eventually you have to pay the runbook tax. Instead you could pay the kubernetes tax or the nomad tax at the start instead of the 12am ansible tax later.