I Deleted 4,000 Lines of AWS CDK and Shipped Faster
summary
A solo hobby SaaS removes about 4,000 lines of AWS CDK — 17 stacks, six GitHub Actions workflows and 1,100 lines of bespoke Go — and replaces them with one Docker Compose file, Coolify on a $12 VPS, and a 788‑line runbook. Monthly cost falls from $300 to $12, uptime and user count improve, and the team trades opaque CDK complexity for reproducibility, reviewability and reversibility that anyone can rebuild.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction and welcome
- 2:09Why I deleted 4,000 lines
- 5:01Why I wrote it first
- 7:30Infrastructure as a part-time job
- 10:40Finding a simpler alternative
- 12:25Before and after numbers
- 14:33Reviewability over automation
- 16:18Is this really ClickOps?
- 18:06Infrastructure as confidence
- 18:51Five key questions
- 21:21Lessons learned and closing
- 22:18Q&A session
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