From someone who has wasted thousands on unnecessary cloud bills, and has a mid-size homelab that’s 80% idle…

I would run everything locally (on a laptop/desktop) until that becomes a limitation, which is probably only the case when you’re ready to go live on mainnet.

Seriously, just use docker, or maybe a kubernetes dev cluster (kind or k3d) if you’re comfortable with it.

From someone who has accidentally lost too many testnet coins…

Use regtest as much as possible. When you’re ready to interface with the world, try one of the signets.

Seriously, be as stingy as possible with your sats. I used to think spending money on hardware and elaborate cloud infra would make me “invested” but the reality is all other resources required to learn this stuff are dwarfed by time, the scarcest resource of all.