About IAM... I worked with that a LOT a couple of years ago. It's interesting but quite the rabbit hole of configurations and permissions.

I used to be an AWS fanatic and got burned. Unless you need to scale up on the spot (and have the time to code management of that) it's a huge waste of time for no good price. EC2 instances have dismal performance.

Just get decent servers somewhere. For most scenarios it's hard to max out a server nowadays, if you program decently. You have to do that for AWS 10x anyways, IMHE. The cloud is a black hole of developer time and problems.

On top of that it's stupid to put data in US when you are a foreign company, you are open game for 3 letter agencies no questions asked.