In modern development, we use Platforms as a Service every day to build custom applications, create integrations, and distribute our code worldwide. PaaS providers like AWS — especially utilizing serverless technologies — allow developers to delegate the management of servers, runtimes, and operating systems to cloud providers. This allows development teams to focus on building differentiating features rather than managing low-level systems.

But what if we took this idea one step further? What if we find the platforms that we build on to be too low-level themselves? How might we take the strategies used by cloud providers to build custom PaaS products that better suit our needs?

In this talk, we will learn about the basic building blocks of a Platform as a Service, and use this knowledge to implement a custom "Netlify-like" PaaS product using AWS, CDK, and TypeScript.

Attendees will understand the benefits of creating their own extended version of the Amazon Cloud Development Kit. They will see how defining rules and setting up standards around CDK can enable better, safer and more maintainable infrastructure as code.