#India #CNCF #Hyderabad #Zepto #Backstage

Zepto Triumphs in CNCF End User Case Study Contest

In a remarkable achievement, Zepto, a rapidly growing quick commerce company based in Bengaluru, has been declared the winner of the CNCF End User Case Study Contest. This accolade recognizes Zepto's significant advancements in developer platform innovation, particularly through its impressive use of technologies like Backstage, Argo, and Kubernetes. This win not only highlights Zepto's commitment to enhancing developer experiences but also sets a benchmark for others in the industry.

The announcement was made by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) on August 5, 2025, as they prepare to convene for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025. Zepto will have the opportunity to present its success story at this esteemed event, scheduled for August 6-7 in Hyderabad.

Addressing Bottlenecks in Development

Zepto faced significant challenges that impeded developer productivity and operational scalability. Teams were spending excessive time onboarding new microservices and configuring CI/CD pipelines manually, hampering efficiency. Furthermore, the lack of visibility across services and environments, compounded by frequent misconfigurations, disrupted service stability.

Qamarali Shaikh, VP of Infrastructure Platform at Zepto, expressed that the company recognized these bottlenecks as critical areas for improvement. "We identified onboarding and provisioning as opportunities to unlock greater efficiency. By evolving these processes, we've enhanced our ability to move fast and consistently deliver with excellence—making pace of execution a true strategic advantage," he stated.

By leveraging Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD, Zepto successfully reduced the onboarding time for developers from two days to just ten minutes. This transformation allowed the company to deploy features much more efficiently, enabling teams to react swiftly to user demands and market fluctuations. The result was a substantial reduction in manual tasks, the elimination of operational hurdles, and a significant enhancement in product delivery timelines.

Building a Robust Internal Developer Platform

To effectively tackle the challenges it faced, Zepto developed an internal developer platform that streamlined the onboarding of new services, infrastructure provisioning, and deployment management. This innovative solution empowered over 500 developers working across more than 20 teams, granting them access to self-serve capabilities with standardized templates and workflows.

Zepto's platform also provided comprehensive visibility into over 700 ArgoCD applications and 400 AWS resources, substantially enhancing operational clarity. This restructuring minimized risks and promoted consistency in operations.

By integrating Backstage as the foundation of the platform, Zepto extended its capabilities with custom plugins designed for dynamic validation, entity generation, metadata management, and performance testing. The seamless integration with tools like ArgoCD, New Relic, Grafana, and SonarQube resulted in a real-time service catalog that improved monitoring and service reliability. ArgoCD facilitated GitOps-based deployments, while Kubernetes served as the orchestration framework, ensuring smooth operations across multiple environments.

Achievements and Future Presentations

The results of Zepto's platform evolution were substantial: a remarkable 90% reduction in setup times, full CI/CD coverage for services, and enhanced operational autonomy for developers were achieved. Weekly onboarding queues were eradicated, and the platform is now capable of supporting consistent, stable deployments that adhere to standardized security and configuration protocols.

CNCF's CTO, Chris Aniszczyk, praised Zepto's implementation, stating that it exemplified the potential that can be unlocked when teams prioritize platform engineering. He emphasized that the synergistic use of Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD empowered Zepto to achieve scale, speed, and reliability across its service offerings.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India, Zepto will share insights on their architecture, lessons learned, and the journey towards building their innovative platform, including details on their custom Backstage plugins. This information aims to inspire industry peers and advance practices within the cloud-native community.

Intuit, the contest's runner-up, will also present during the keynote session, elaborating on how CNCF projects support their extensive AI-native development platform, which serves over 2,500 services across 325 clusters.

For more information and a detailed event schedule, including Zepto's session titled "Scaling Developer Experience with Backstage and GitOps" on August 7, please visit CNCF's official site.

This victory underscores Zepto's dedication to technological advancement and operational excellence, paving the way for the future of quick commerce solutions.

Conclusion

With this prestigious award, Zepto not only celebrates its current successes but also embraces the opportunity to lead and innovate within its field. The company's commitment to enhancing the developer experience through modern tools and methodologies positions them as a formidable player in the tech landscape moving forward.