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# Let developers develop again

Trapped in ITIL hell, Schwarz Group faced agonizing 90-day deployment cycles. By eliminating technical silos and building a custom developer portal, they reduced deployments to a single day.

- **Speakers:** Kai Geißelhardt, Volker Zöpfel
- **Event:** World Congress 2022
- **Published:** June 15, 2022
- **Duration:** 26:47
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/463-let-developers-develop-again

## Summary

Enterprise IT environments often suffer from siloed departments, endless meetings, and crushing technical complexity that distracts software engineers from actually writing code. Tasked with migrating a massive retail online shop to a cloud-native environment within two years, the engineering team at Schwartz Group realized that manual infrastructure provisioning, slow release-driven approaches, and fragmented communication were severely limiting developer velocity. To combat this "ITIL hell" and prevent developers from suffering from "new age hipsterism"—constantly chasing fragmented tools—they needed to drastically reduce the frictional steps between a developer's original idea and a live production state.

Before launching new automated tooling, the organization shifted away from fragmented technical silos into cross-functional, project-driven teams to ensure operations, infrastructure, and development worked as unified units. They established a shared technical vocabulary to prevent communication breakdowns and aligned their engineering objectives into a single roadmap to guide the transition. This foundational culture shift demonstrated a critical insight: organizational alignment and process optimization must precede technological enablement to successfully eliminate manual infrastructure administrative hurdles.

To standardize and hyper-accelerate deployments, the team built a self-service internal developer portal called the "One Developer Journey" (ODJ). This custom abstraction platform automates up to 160 operational tasks, instantly provisioning Kubernetes runtime environments, CI/CD pipelines via Azure DevOps, security scanning with Snyk, and code quality testing using SonarQube. ODJ features an intuitive service catalog and API management system that automatically resolves and injects infrastructure dependencies—like databases or public storage buckets—directly into an application context. By gracefully hiding multi-cloud infrastructure complexities across Azure, Google Cloud, and their internal StackIT cloud, this comprehensive developer platform reduced the time it takes to go from a basic idea to an active production deployment from 90 days down to a single day.

**Keywords:** enterprise IT transformation, internal developer portal, cloud-native application migration, multicloud infrastructure abstraction, automated infrastructure provisioning, kubernetes runtime environments, cross-functional project teams, organizational silo elimination, self-service developer platforms, internal API management, CI/CD pipeline automation, infrastructure dependency injection, terraform infrastructure as code, developer experience optimization, continuous deployment delivery

## Chapters

1. **Establishing context and historical development challenges** (01:24) — How developers overcome the overwhelming complexity of modern tooling and slow enterprise silos to regain productivity.
1. **Transforming legacy platforms to cloud native patterns** (05:47) — How shifting away from release-driven approaches allows organizations to successfully migrate traditional e-commerce shops to cloud-native platforms.
1. **Aligning project communication and breaking enterprise silos** (07:36) — Why replacing organizational silos with cross-functional teams and shared domain language increases iteration speed.
1. **Automating the developer journey to accelerate deployments** (10:13) — How automating deployment pipelines and infrastructure tasks shrinks idea-to-production cycles from months to days.
1. **Demonstrating automated platform subscriptions and project setups** (12:34) — How an internal portal simplifies initial project phases by dynamically managing team roles and subscription configurations.
1. **Provisioning infrastructure via opinionated runtime environments** (14:54) — Selecting opinionated runtime presets automatically provisions complex hyperscaler resources like clusters without manual administrative overhead.
1. **Standardizing initial repositories and deployment components** (17:20) — Generating pre-integrated repositories equipped with security scanners and artifact managers prevents manual toolchain setup errors.
1. **Automating credential injections and component dependencies** (19:48) — How the platform injects connectivity data and runtime secrets safely to streamline external service management.
1. **Ensuring multi-cloud portability with infrastructure as code** (21:07) — Using centralized infrastructure code allows teams to transparently migrate entire application environments across different cloud providers.
1. **Driving internal collaboration using a centralized service catalog** (23:36) — Standardizing APIs within an internal service catalog accelerates service discovery and integration for dependent project teams.

## Related Moments

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- [Transitioning automated delivery pipelines into internal developer platform solutions](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/815-gitops-for-the-people) (from "GitOps for the people")
- [Fostering team collaboration through common infrastructure abstractions](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/182-gitops-keeps-focus-on-apps-not-on-infrastructure) (from "GitOps keeps focus on apps, not on infrastructure")
- [Automating developer experiences with centralized platform services](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/891-coffee-with-developers-michael-koitz) (from "Coffee With Developers Michael Koitz")
- [Automating infrastructure to eliminate traditional DevOps roles](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/371-retooling-and-refactoring-an-investment-in-people) (from "Retooling and refactoring - an investment in people.")
- [Empowering non-traditional developers through skill-based automated deployment](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1894-shipping-faster-with-less-render-on-cloud-hosting-ai-workloads-and-the-future-of-devops) (from "Shipping Faster with Less: Render on Cloud Hosting, AI Workloads, and the Future of DevOps")

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