[romanhn]

First off, I don't think anyone can answer these questions for you. There are a ton of considerations that could influence the end result, and you haven't provided any context really, so any answers you get will reflect this. That said I'll give it a shot.

1. You'll likely get a bunch of opposing opinions here on HN, it's a divisive topic (which probably means you can go with either and be fine). That said, my recommendation would be to start with the cloud - tons of managed services out of the box, good default security, lots of resources, ease of experimentation and rolling back infra that didn't work out, etc. Look into serverless tech like Lambda to control costs.

2. Whatever you already know best. Unless you're looking to learn some specific tech. But if you're focused on delivery, underlying languages/frameworks matter vanishingly little.