With AWS/Google, you don't have to worry about hardware and OS, that's the entire point of the cloud. You are more focused on your apps, of course it costs a bit more, but hopefully you save it by not having to deal with hardware or OS issues.

Sure, there's Lambda but if you need EC2 then you do need to worry about the OS. And while you do not need to worry about the hardware breaking down, that's the same when you are renting a physical or a virtual server because you need to build a redundant infra anyways and whether the fallen node comes back in an hour or you can spin it up yourself is of little consequence. And you still need to understand your hardware if you want performance.

If your talking about ec2 instances, its really the hardware and physical networking you don't have to worry about. You manage the virtual networking, hosts, etc.