[alexander0042]

You clearly know way more about cloud implementations than I do, so I really appreciate the time you took to explain that out! Since I am the dev here though, the one things I can confirm is that you're 100% correct about the setup methodology- almost every decision was based on "how can I do this in a way that's cost effective". In particular, the underlying data was already on AWS, so it just made sense to build it there.

I think one thing that gets lost in discussion is the advantages of serverless approaches for people without a ton of technical background. I built 90% of this without knowing anything about servers or APIs, but the cloud tools (from whoever) let me ignore all of that and just write a bunch of Python scripts that do cool things. I know it ends up sounding a bit like an AWS ad (I wish I was sponsored by them, but am not), but there really are perks to the approach