These days it seems to be taken for granted that containers are being used for servers. I was a junior developer back then but I can recall some stuff. I'll lay out how things were and I'd like someone to add missing parts.
- create zip file (containing all the code + packages)
- ssh into server
- unzip it
- configure apache
- setup multiple servers (optional)
- implement auto scaling with configuration files... (really don't remember this part)
- I believe this required something like Chef or similar program where you'd have a configuration file that EC2 could use, or have bash scripts that would basically run all the commands