CI/CD pipelines for small Malaysian engineering teams — what actually works

We're a team of 6 engineers at a Malaysian fintech. Here's what our CI/CD setup looks like after two years of iteration.

What we use:
- GitHub Actions for CI (free tier covers most of our needs)
- Docker for containerisation
- AWS ECR + ECS for deployment
- Terraform for infrastructure as code

What we dropped:
- Jenkins: too much overhead to maintain for a small team
- CircleCI: pricing changed in a way that made it less attractive than GitHub Actions

For those just starting:
GitHub Actions + a simple deployment to a single cloud server (EC2, DigitalOcean Droplet, or even Railway) is a perfectly valid starting point. You don't need Kubernetes until you have scaling problems you can actually measure.

Malaysian-specific note: AWS ap-southeast-1 (Singapore) is the default region for most Malaysian companies. Latency is good and the region has full service availability.