Zepto Wins CNCF Case Study Award for Developer Platform Innovation

HYDERABAD: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has named Bengaluru-based quick commerce startup Zepto as the winner of its End User Case Study Contest, recognizing the company’s pioneering work in developer platform automation. Zepto presented its technical journey and achievements at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025,   held on Hyderabad on August 6–7.

Zepto was selected for its success in transforming developer experience through a fully automated internal platform built on Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD. The company overcame critical bottlenecks in onboarding, infrastructure provisioning, and deployment, achieving measurable improvements in operational efficiency and developer productivity.

“We identified onboarding and provisioning as areas where we could unlock real value,” said Qamarali Shaikh, VP of Infrastructure Platform at Zepto. “By building a developer platform using Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD, we reduced onboarding from two days to just ten minutes. This allowed teams to deploy features faster and respond more rapidly to user and market demands.”

Platform at Scale

To address scaling challenges, Zepto developed a self-service platform that empowers over 500 developers across 20+ teams to onboard services using standardized templates and workflows. This eliminated manual effort, reduced configuration errors, and enabled consistent CI/CD practices across environments.

The platform manages over 700 ArgoCD applications and 400 AWS resources, offering unified visibility and real-time operational insight. It also includes custom automation that intelligently maps services using APM data, DNS resolution, and cloud tagging.

Backstage serves as the core interface, extended with custom plugins for dynamic validations, metadata management, performance testing, deployment orchestration, and rollback workflows. ArgoCD handles GitOps-based deployments, while Kubernetes orchestrates across four separate environments.

The initiative delivered:

• 90% reduction in service setup time
• Full CI/CD coverage across services
• Self-service deployment and provisioning
• Elimination of onboarding backlogs

Recognition and Broader Impact

“Zepto’s implementation is a strong example of what platform engineering can achieve,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “By combining Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD, they’ve built a scalable, resilient, and developer-first ecosystem. Their journey offers valuable lessons for the broader cloud native community.”

Zepto’s upcoming presentation at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025 will walk through its platform architecture, adoption strategy, and technical deep-dives—including the design of its custom Backstage plugins.

The contest’s runner-up, Intuit, will also speak during the keynote session, sharing its experience in building an AI-native development platform that supports over 2,500 services across 325 Kubernetes clusters.

CNCF’s End User Case Study Contest aims to highlight organizations that demonstrate significant real-world impact through open source cloud native tools. Zepto’s win signals a growing momentum for platform engineering in India’s tech ecosystem.