Bastian Heilemann, Bruno Margula

Empowering Thousands of Developers: Our Journey to an Internal Developer Platform

How do you unify 6,000 developers? ZEISS built a federated platform that cut external onboarding from four weeks to one and enabled massive, automated migrations.

Empowering Thousands of Developers: Our Journey to an Internal Developer Platform
#1about 5 minutes

Understanding the scale and diversity of development at Zeiss

Zeiss supports over 6,000 developers across diverse sectors like medical technology and semiconductor manufacturing, creating unique challenges.

#2about 2 minutes

Addressing fragmentation and ownership challenges in a large enterprise

Key development challenges include fragmentation of tools and processes, defining ownership, and balancing generalization with specialization.

#3about 4 minutes

Adopting a platform engineering strategy for developer empowerment

The company's strategy involves creating a "factory platform" to streamline development and a developer portal to solve discovery issues.

#4about 2 minutes

Scaling knowledge and decisions with fleet management frameworks

Fleet management enables self-service, lifecycle tracking, and scalable decision-making through tools like ADRs and Wardley Maps.

#5about 2 minutes

Centralizing discovery and access with a developer portal

The Zeiss Developer Portal, built on Backstage, provides a single pane of glass for documentation, tech radars, and self-service interfaces.

#6about 4 minutes

Building specialized platforms for GenAI, data, and web

Instead of a single platform, Zeiss builds specialized platforms for GenAI, data analytics, and a web application platform with a MACH architecture.

#7about 4 minutes

The technical architecture of the multi-tenant web platform

The web platform uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for a multi-tenant, multi-region foundation and is managed as an internal product.

#8about 4 minutes

A success story of integrating micro-frontends into a CMS

Developers created React-based micro-frontends that non-technical authors can easily embed into the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) website.

#9about 3 minutes

Automating large-scale code migrations across the fleet

A dedicated software migration toolbox automates updates, such as migrating a UX library across 70% of projects in just three weeks.

Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Featured Partners

Related Videos

Let developers develop again26:47

Let developers develop again

Kai Geißelhardt & Volker Zöpfel

Forget Developer Platforms, Think Developer Productivity!57:45

Forget Developer Platforms, Think Developer Productivity!

Robert Hoffmann & Christian Denich

Introducing a Digital Service Catalog for speed and scale20:28

Introducing a Digital Service Catalog for speed and scale

Bastian Heilemann & Akash Manjunath

The AI-Ready Stack: Rethinking the Engineering Org of the Future28:09

The AI-Ready Stack: Rethinking the Engineering Org of the Future

Jan Oberhauser, Mirko Novakovic, Alex Laubscher, Keno Dreßel

Platform Engineering untold truths: is just an infrastructure matter?26:16

Platform Engineering untold truths: is just an infrastructure matter?

Graziano Casto

Platform Engineering vs. DevOps Why not both?58:40

Platform Engineering vs. DevOps Why not both?

Christian Strack

Forget Developer Platforms, Think Developer Productivity!23:03

Forget Developer Platforms, Think Developer Productivity!

Robert Hoffmann

Navigating the Corporate Jungle: Life as a Developer in a large Company28:16

Navigating the Corporate Jungle: Life as a Developer in a large Company

Alexandra Petri

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.