A new dog training business is launched. You have 5 weeks to develop a new production-ready platform before Crufts: the world's biggest dog show. Could you deliver?

In this talk, I'll share the real-world journey of building WolfieAndFriends on AWS. We'll review my architectural choices, "build vs buy" decisions and the trade-offs made during those hectic early days. You'll learn how to use AWS serverless, IaC and AI services to enable rapid delivery, shorten development times and transform a greenfield project into a professional, scalable platform that pays the bills.

Whether you're a startup founder or an enterprise dev, you'll walk away with a blueprint for rapid delivery without sacrificing long-term stability. Expect Amplify, CDK, Q Developer, Kiro and more!

Learning Takeaways

• How to make fast, defensible architectural decisions under genuine time pressure.
• How to use AWS CDK, Amplify Gen 2, Q Developer, and Kiro as an integrated rapid-delivery stack.
• Practical "build vs buy" trade-offs: what to own, what to delegate, and how to decide.
• How serverless IaC enables safe iteration from greenfield to production.
• A reusable blueprint for going from zero to a scalable, paying platform in weeks — not months.

About the Speaker

Damien Jones is an AWS consultant, data specialist, and cloud enthusiast with a strong record of designing, building, and optimising cloud-native solutions. He has extensive knowledge of data engineering, DevOps and cloud architectures, fueled by a passion for using emerging technologies to solve complex problems and support data-driven decision making. Damien is also active in the cloud community, serving as a content creator, user group leader and public speaker.