I left home when the whole "just toss it into AWS push the scale button and go for IPO" started in the West, and got behind the gfw when if you want it to be good it needs to be inside the gfw even if the server outside are reachable.

There is alternatives now like the aliyun from alibaba, but for us that was not an alternative since they have not really reached the same level as AWS.

So its kinda fun to do the basic stuff since its usually easier for us to build everything ourself than to outsource.