I've worked with quite a few small teams in the past, part time. Never had a fleet as small as 2 VMs, more like 20-120. That's a good summary. Only thing missing that comes up always is the CI/CD workflow. I've found bitbucket's CD surprisingly _good_ once you follow the enforced pattern, especially for small teams who don't want to spent too much on release technicalities.

Then there's more nuanced things that most teams will miss early on without someone pointing the problem and the solution e.g. decouple configuration from the app, design stateless apps (e.g. 12 factor app), use secrets management easily (e.g. dynamoDB based solutions like credstash are dirt cheap, AWS secrets is okay-ish), used managed DBs (RDS is the most common choice) and more.