Improving developer productivity with Platform as a Product | PlatformCon 2023

Mercedes-Benz Group AG’s platform engineering team utilizes a "platform as a product" strategy to enhance developer productivity through their Dynamic Hybrid Cloud (DHC). By shifting from a top-down mandate to a grassroots, bottom-up approach, the team successfully scaled their Cloud Foundry platform from a single project—the Mercedes me mobile application—to supporting over 200 projects and 3,000 instances. Key to this growth is a focus on high-frequency deployment, extensive automation of recurring tasks like patching, and active engagement with the developer community via internal training and real-time support on Mattermost. By treating developers as primary customers and fostering a culture of continuous feedback, the team maintains a hybrid infrastructure across on-premise data centers and AWS, ensuring that platform services align directly with the evolving technical demands of internal development teams.