Optimizing Magento Speed in the backend and frontend, Move Servers and install CDN and load balancers

We are a e-commerce website based in India and currently using rackspace hosting in the US on a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid). Our website is extremely slow on the frontend and backend although we are using 16GBs of RAM. Our MySQL server also seems to be overloaded with the 10000 products we have uploaded and it takes forever to upload products. We also have huge problems when 2-3 uploaders are uploading data at the same time as our database is very slow. We plan to shift our servers to Amazon Web Services in Singapore to improve the latency. We need to setup a new server using the preferred platform, install CDNs, Load balancers, maybe a separate server for the database. We want to have a blazing fast system but at the same time be economical. Optimizations in code, installing magento extensions like nitrogeno etc will be needed. Basically need to convert a horribly slow magento store to a blazing fast one. Previous experience required.