I haven't. That's all Ops, and I'm a developer. We're a pretty small team of about 15, and managing physical servers would require a big investment in staff alone.

There is little difference in managing a bare metal server vs an AWS VM. Both can come preinstalled with your OS of choice. And you are responsible for maintaining the system either way. I'm not talking about colocating your own hardware in a data center. Just renting bare metal.