Zepto Wins CNCF End User Case Study Contest for Developer Platform Innovation with Backstage, Argo, and Kubernetes

Company to present platform automation success story at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025

HYDERABAD, India, Aug. 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced Zepto as the winner of the CNCF End User Case Study Contest. Selected for its comprehensive automation and developer experience improvements using Backstage, Argo, and Kubernetes, Zepto will present its platform journey at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025, 6-7 August in Hyderabad.

Zepto, a fast-growing quick commerce company based in Bengaluru, faced critical bottlenecks that limited developer productivity and operational scalability. Teams spent days manually onboarding new microservices, configuring CI/CD pipelines, and provisioning infrastructure, with little visibility across services or environments. The lack of standardization caused frequent misconfigurations and service instability.

"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," said Qamarali Shaikh, VP Infrastructure Platform at Zepto. "By building a developer platform with Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD, we reduced onboarding from 2 days to 10 minutes. Feature deployment is now far more efficient, allowing teams to respond to user needs and market changes more rapidly. This has cut manual overhead, removed operational roadblocks, and enabled faster product delivery across the board."

To address these challenges, Zepto built an internal developer platform using Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD, streamlining how teams onboard new services, provision infrastructure, and manage deployments. The solution enabled 500+ developers across 20+ teams to self-serve with standardized templates and workflows, removing operational dependencies and inconsistencies. It also provided unified visibility across 700+ ArgoCD applications and 400+ AWS resources, improving operational clarity and reducing risk.

Backstage provided the foundation for the platform, extended with custom plugins for dynamic validation, entity generation, metadata management, deployment/rollbacks, and performance testing. Integrations with tools like ArgoCD, New Relic, Grafana, and SonarQube enabled a real-time service catalog. ArgoCD powered GitOps-based deployments, while Kubernetes served as the orchestration layer across four environments. The team also implemented a custom automation that combines APM data, DNS resolution, and cloud tagging to enable intelligent service mapping.

The platform delivered measurable outcomes: a 90% reduction in setup time, full CI/CD coverage across services, and complete operational independence for developers. Weekly onboarding queues were eliminated, and the platform now supports frequent, stable deployments with standardized security and configuration practices.

"Zepto's implementation is a strong example of what's possible when teams take platform engineering seriously," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF. "By combining the strengths of Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD, they've enabled scale, speed, and consistency for hundreds of services and shared valuable learnings with the cloud native community."

Their upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India presentation will detail the architecture, adoption journey, and technical lessons from building the platform, along with insights into their custom Backstage plugins.

Contest runner-up Intuit will also present during the keynote session, "Voices of Impact: End Users Leading the Cloud Native Shift," sharing how CNCF projects underpin their AI-native development platform, supporting 2,500+ services across 325 clusters.

For more information and the full event schedule, including Zepto's session "Scaling Developer Experience with Backstage and GitOps" on 7 August, visit: https://hubs.la/Q03zG-tp0

Additional Resources

• CNCF Newsletter
• CNCF Twitter
• CNCF Website
• Learn About CNCF Membership
• Learn About the CNCF End User Community

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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Media Contact
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The Linux Foundation
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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation