Nitpicking: from an architectural point of view, I don't see why you would opt for "build you own cloud on top of Amazon", as opposed to leveraging the Amazon stack, especially because the author points out it is a small team.

Maybe it's a resource issue, or they need some things that cost too much money on Amazon, but the author should at least justify why kubernetes was chosen.

My apologies for ranting about this, but I've seen this approach way to much, wasting valuable company dollars.