The 2025 AWS outage exposed how dependent we are on centralized cloud giants that profit from our data and control our digital lives through surveillance and censorship. Building your own cloud restores autonomy: connect devices with Tailscale, orchestrate apps using k3s, route traffic securely via cloudflared tunnels, and ensure reproducibility with NixOS. Like assembling Legos, you can mix local machines and cloud VMs to form a self-hosted, hybrid cloud. It’s not just a technical project—it’s a political act of reclaiming privacy, resilience, and digital sovereignty from Big Tech’s monopolized infrastructure.