I Deleted 4,000 Lines of AWS CDK and Shipped Faster

In this IaCConf 2026 session, Joseph Goksu (senior platform engineer and four-time AWS Community Builder in Security and Identity) shares the story of why he deleted nearly 4,000 lines of AWS CDK from one of his own projects, and what that exercise taught him about what infrastructure as code is actually for. Joseph walks through the evolution of Markwise, his solo SaaS hobby project: from a bash script on his laptop, to 17 CDK stacks, six GitHub Actions workflows, 1,100 lines of custom Golang tooling to manage SSM parameters, and a 2 AM Saturday spent reading IAM trust policy JSON to ship a one-line copy change. That was the moment the infrastructure became the product. One weekend later, Joseph had migrated everything to a single Docker Compose file, a 788-line markdown runbook, and Coolify running on a $12 VPS. Same product, more users, better uptime. Monthly infrastructure cost dropped from $300 to $12. The talk lands on a definition worth pinning up: infrastructure as code is not measured in lines of code. It's measured in confidence. Reproducibility, reviewability, and reversibility are the three properties that matter; the specific tool you reach for is negotiable. Memorable takeaways: The unit of IaC is the rebuild, not the file. If your IaC requires one expert in the room to rebuild, that's not IaC. It's a private language. Ask yourself: how many people will actually edit this infrastructure? AI lets you ship faster, but it also makes it easier to skip understanding what's happening underneath. Read the code. Conway's Law is real. The tool you pick shapes the team you build. Joseph also covers the five questions every engineer should ask before writing their first stack, why CDK is still the right choice for many teams, and how to think about the blend of AI tools, traditional IaC, and PaaS options in 2026. This session is essential viewing for platform engineers, solo founders, DevOps practitioners, and anyone questioning whether their infrastructure complexity matches the size of the problem they're solving. Watch every session on demand:    • IaCConf 2026   Learn more about the IaCConf community: https://iacconf.com Follow IaCConf on LinkedIn for community updates and announcements about IaCConf 2027:   / iac-conf