I would listen to the CTO. I would also recommend packaging your applications as containers already and run in Docker/Podman/K3s. That way once you hire someone

I would listen to the CTO. I would also recommend packaging your applications as containers already and run in Docker/Podman/K3s. That way once you hire someone to deal with infra they can easily bring the containers into a Kubernetes cluster and scale either way. And once it's on Kubernetes it's quite easy to migrate that wherever you want as well. That's the beauty of containers right there. Eventually you'll end up with a Kubernetes cluster and a bunch of Helm charts either way.