[klooney]

If you want something that's free locally, but has a pretty good port-to-cloud story, you want kubernetes.

Getting live with EKS in AWS is a little scary and painful and not cheap, but if you just work through https://www.eksworkshop.com/ it's pretty plug and chug.

Doing it with Cloudformation or Terraform or something built on top like Pulumi or the CDK is something I wouldn't recommend unless you do this for a living. Just stand up the infra manually- doing a bad job is like 10% of the work required to do a "good" infra as code job, and you don't sound interested in the project.

All your actual app stuff can be nice declarative k8s yaml, and you'll be good to go indefinitely.