Just because this popped up in search results, it’s worth saying that interop with AWS still is a long standing problem for the R community. Cloudyr has continued to make great strides… but AWS switches up their web APIs a bit too much and the surface area is huge (and expanding). Having programmed in R against AWS a lot over the past five years, my take is that your best bet is to program against an AWS-supported SDK. There is none for R, but language interop is a place where R shines. {reticulate} (Python) and using boto3 is my current favored approach. In the past I’ve also used {rJava} to connect to the AWS Java SDK (my package for doing that was {awsjavasdk}).
As for starting up a temporary cluster? It’s a headache - but doable. But, I’ve long since stopped maintaining any tooling for doing that. If I’ve a problem that requires more than the 24 TB of RAM offered by a u-24tb1.metal and its 448 processors… then I don’t really want to be fussing with a SOCK cluster.