Tradeoffs, Primitives, and No Silver Bullets

Building a global restaurant SaaS platform to support tens of thousands of stores is hard. Doing it while enabling rapid innovation for iconic brands like Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger is even harder. Each brand and market has unique operational and customer needs, which means pure architectures often give way to real-world constraints: speed, cost, and team composition.

This talk is a behind-the-scenes look at how we built the Byte by Yum! platform using a pragmatic mix of AWS services: containers where it makes sense, serverless where it shines, and managed open source where we need control. We’ll show how we created a core platform that supports menu management, ordering, kitchen operations, and AI workflows, using domain primitives that enable rapid iteration and reduced time to market.

We’ll also explore how we delivered new products quickly using AWS services like EventBridge schedules, DynamoDB streams, and Express Step Functions – while achieving high availability, extreme scale, and cost efficiency.

This is a no-nonsense look at what it takes to build and evolve a global platform: the tradeoffs, the building blocks, and why there’s never a silver bullet.