Tech/Software :
1
Monolith is the way to go. Micro-services are just distributed-monolith. Except when the task is too much isolated from the system. And then it's a service, not a micro-service.
https://changelog.com/posts/monoliths-are-the-future
2
AWS and other managed services will cost you 10 times more than virtual or raw boxes. Both for small or large usage. And it's not admin-cost-free either. Rather now you have to pay a troop of deployment expert that manage those services instead of servers. Taking it overall the cost is always at least 2 times higher for services.