Application logs should be shipped over the network to either your own ELK infrastructure or some hosted solution like Loggly, Logentries or Papertrail. Boot logs can be obtained from your infrastructure (like EC2 instance logs).

And when that stops working for some reason? of course the real solution to have out of band managemnet

I have a seen a decent answer for this question when people talk about 'immutable' hosts.

the network is 100% reliable, always. The internet, doubly so (it's so big, you know). Maybe you missed the memo.

Well as a "circuit switched bigot" Vint must have left me off the mailing list :-)

I used to to do OSI international interconnect support an testing for my sins many moons ago.