Over 40% of the Web is deployed this way. Wordpress installation is basically "upload some files, complete installation GUI, and then get started."
There's no reason other products couldn't do this as well, even those with a complicated stack that requires provisioning cloud resources (or equivalently, SSH'ing into servers on the local network or calling private cloud API endpoints). If you can deploy a commit from a pipeline, then you can make a self-hosted bootstrappable installer for your users.
The installer could be a tiny shim running on the user's laptop that's responsible for bootstrapping the rest of the infrastructure and then deleting itself after redirecting the user to the cluster admin panel. The trick is to make it smooth, so even non-technical users can provision and eventually administer a secure, self-updating cluster as easily as they can keep their iPhone up to date. Walk them through the process of getting AWS credentials. Heck, scrape and script the login flows if that makes it smoother (it's their computer running the code so who cares?). Ask the user the minimal questions needed to fill the config. Once all that's in place, trigger your deployment scripts on the cluster, to pull images from a container registry or whatever. Wait for it to be up and running.
When the cluster's up, redirect them to its admin panel that's more sophisticated and controlled by you. Let them check for updates, install plugins, run common operations (like "restart," etc).
Then just don't ship broken code, make sure your scaling policies work (or at least that they work well enough to avoid phone calls from customers that don't make you any money). And boom you've got a nice product.
I'm not saying it's easy. But if you already have automated deployments (you do have automated deployments, right?), then it's not that many extra steps. Productizing it is hard but can be done.
There's no reason other products couldn't do this as well, even those with a complicated stack that requires provisioning cloud resources (or equivalently, SSH'ing into servers on the local network or calling private cloud API endpoints). If you can deploy a commit from a pipeline, then you can make a self-hosted bootstrappable installer for your users.
The installer could be a tiny shim running on the user's laptop that's responsible for bootstrapping the rest of the infrastructure and then deleting itself after redirecting the user to the cluster admin panel. The trick is to make it smooth, so even non-technical users can provision and eventually administer a secure, self-updating cluster as easily as they can keep their iPhone up to date. Walk them through the process of getting AWS credentials. Heck, scrape and script the login flows if that makes it smoother (it's their computer running the code so who cares?). Ask the user the minimal questions needed to fill the config. Once all that's in place, trigger your deployment scripts on the cluster, to pull images from a container registry or whatever. Wait for it to be up and running.
When the cluster's up, redirect them to its admin panel that's more sophisticated and controlled by you. Let them check for updates, install plugins, run common operations (like "restart," etc).
Then just don't ship broken code, make sure your scaling policies work (or at least that they work well enough to avoid phone calls from customers that don't make you any money). And boom you've got a nice product.
I'm not saying it's easy. But if you already have automated deployments (you do have automated deployments, right?), then it's not that many extra steps. Productizing it is hard but can be done.