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

ZEISS, a globally leading company in various industries such as semiconductor manufacturing, medical technology, measurement technology and ophthalmology, is at the forefront of digital transformation. Within ZEISS, over 6,000 developers worldwide drive innovations across a wide range of areas, including cloud applications, IoT, embedded systems, AI, and data solutions.

This diversity presents various challenges, both in the development of specific products and in the more general developer experience. These challenges involve managing large volumes of complex data, providing the necessary service infrastructure, monitoring and optimizing that infrastructure, and implementing AI technologies. All of this is done with the consideration that ZEISS developers are working on “not just” software, but also on cyber-physical systems.

In our talk, we will explain how our AI-driven platform engineering strategy creates a more agile and efficient development ecosystem that fosters innovation across various industries and addresses the stated challenges.

This platform, which is based on Kubernetes and Azure, provides a powerful foundation for self-service capabilities that allow developers to deploy applications seamlessly. By integrating Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and a robust governance framework, we ensure that our systems are resilient and compliant.

The experiences gathered in the process of creating our platform is what we want to share. We focus in the talk on demonstrating, through a real-world example, how relieving developers in such a complex environment can look by creating “paved paths” - standardized workflows that enhance productivity and reduce friction.