Just starting, for 95% of products I recommend a Heroku-alike. Don’t worry about scaling or scalability until you’ve figured out your PMF. Don’t invest in the infrastructure involved in affordable scaling. Just build. At most, containerize for portability. Outsource your infrastructure maintenance and management and config and upgrades and security and and and.

Your job at this stage isn’t to build something technically awesome and beautifully architected or even production-ready by most standards. It’s to figure out what people will pay for. Focus your energy on that.

Once you’ve got your first hundred customers/thousand users and are serving >100k requests/day, think about what it will take to scale infra affordably.

(YMMV if your product is exceptionally compute-heavy, such as a custom ML model, or involves complex data pipelines out of the gate or other edge cases.)