How Zepto Delivers Both Groceries & Microservices In 10 Minu…

Zepto now intends to sell land parcels within 10 minutes on its app, in partnership with real estate developer House of Abhinandan Lodha. The quick commerce startup seems to be expanding operations rapidly. This speed is not just limited to things being sold on the app, as per the engineers at Zepto, who say: “At Zepto, we deliver groceries and microservices in 10 minutes”.   

The engineers, Abhishek BVS and Sandesh Gupta, were addressing the gathering at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025 event in Hyderabad, India, held this month by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Zepto was declared the winner of the CNCF End User Case Study Contest, earning recognition for its comprehensive automation and developer experience improvements using Backstage. 

Qamarali Shaikh, VP, infrastructure platform at Zepto, said the company reduced onboarding time from two days to 10 minutes by building a developer platform with Backstage, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD. “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,” he said. 

The solution enabled 500+ developers across 20+ teams to self-serve with standardised templates and workflows, removing operational dependencies and inconsistencies. 

Furthermore, it provided unified visibility across 700+ ArgoCD applications and 400+ AWS resources, improving operational clarity. 

The two platform engineers, Gupta and Abhishek, explained both the problem and the solution in detail in a keynote presentation at the CNCF event. 

As the startup scaled up to deliver 1.5 million orders per day, developers began to face numerous challenges. 

“Developers were juggling between different URLs and tools just to get the simplest of tasks done. Searching for relevant documentation became a Jira task in itself,” they said, adding that manual copy-pasting of artefacts just to bootstrap anything new led to frequent mistakes. This resulted in a high turnaround time due to the knowledge required for infrastructure manifests, and it also led to inconsistent enforcement of standards and security practices. 

As their team evaluated various options, they selected Backstage, an open-source developer portal created by Spotify. Utilising it as the foundation of their internal developer platform (IDP) provided many advantages. This led to a unified portal featuring a software catalogue, templating, and authentication. 

It also allowed for a flexible permission system, extensibility through plugins, and, notably, out-of-the-box integration with Kubernetes, Argo, GitHub, and other core systems, the duo elaborated.  

The transformation began with onboarding tasks, which were streamlined through repository scaffolding with boilerplates, role-based access controls, and reusable workflow templates for code analysis, security scans, and CI/CD pipelines. 

Besides, infrastructure provisioning for databases, Kafka, caches, and object storage was automated, while microservice onboarding was simplified with Kubernetes, ArgoCD, KEDA, Ingress configurations and alerting. Moreover, developers could even spin up complete environments in one click via DevSpace integrated into Backstage.

For day-two tasks, Zepto enabled features such as easy deployment rollbacks, version tracking, and self-service scaling — all supported by a centralised metadata catalogue of all services and resources. Additionally, a visual dependency graph helped teams understand upstream and downstream interactions, while integrated performance testing workflows ensured reliability. 

The engineers said that the result was an improved developer experience, which saved more than an hour per developer per day. Besides, microservice onboarding time was reduced by 90%, and operational queries were reduced by 30%. “I would like to conclude that at Zepto, we deliver groceries and microservices in 10 minutes,” they added on stage. 

The Gold Standard for an IDP?

The above is just one of many experiences with Backstage, as shared by numerous leading companies in the industry. In 2024, Spotify said in a blog post that Backstage reached 60,000 total contributions and now supports over 210 open source plugins. Besides, around 278 companies have publicly stated the adoption of Backstage. 

Indian IT services giant Infosys has also used Backstage to improve developer experience for one of its customers. The company built an internal developer platform called Chofer, based on Backstage, to standardise development across 1,600+ cloud apps and 100+ teams, aiming for a one-stop portal that improved time-to-market, unified tooling/observability, and enforced security and compliance. This led to a cost savings of around $5 million in annual cloud infrastructure costs, or up to $96,000 in infrastructure costs per team. 

Similarly, Chicago Trading Company stated in a case study that it saved 18 months of developer effort with Backstage.

“Backstage made onboarding [to the new DevOps platform] not scary,” said Scott Kausler, a DevOps engineer from the company, in a blog post. He added that Backstage offers a range of easy-to-use features right out of the box, and since it is open source, it is easy to observe how it behaves and work within this behaviour. 

“Because now — all of a sudden — you have this recipe for how to do it, you don’t have to jump through these hoops, the templates are there and ready for you. You choose what you want based on these templates we have available, and you’re off and running on your own,” Kausler added. 

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