Build or Buy an iPaaS? We Built It. Here's the Honest Story.

We had a deadline, a vision, and a stack we thought we understood. Only two survived contact with reality. So what does it actually take to build an integration platform from scratch—while the business keeps running?

This is the honest story of how a small team built an iPaaS, migrating ~100 business processes from a vendor platform in under a year while simultaneously designing and building the platform itself. We’ll cover the pipeline-based execution model we built, the architectural decisions behind it, and the tools we chose—not because they were exciting, but because they worked: Java, Spring, KEDA, JSLT, GitOps.

But this isn’t just an architecture talk. We’ll be candid about the gap between the vision—a no-code canvas, reusable building blocks, full self-service—and what we actually shipped. We’ll explore where the complexity really went, and what it means to take that debt on deliberately.

Key takeaways: • How to design a pipeline-based integration platform using familiar, “boring” tools

• How to make isolated deployments cost-effective with event-driven autoscaling

• Why “build vs buy” is often a false choice—and how to reason about it

• How to earn the right to build it right by shipping something real first

Target audience: Software engineers, architects, and engineering managers dealing with integration sprawl or considering internal platforms.