15 years of DevOpsDays

Platform Engineering XXL
2024-09-05 , Main Room

SAP has ~30.000 people working in it's development organization, with >1000 products on their price list using various technology stacks. How to increase developer productivity at this scale?

Backed by inhouse user research and industry trends they decided to lower their teams cognitive load by introducing an internal developer platform called 'Hyperspace'.

Dirk will talk about the obstacles of creating 'Hyperspace' with an "Platform as a Product" approach to an organization that is highly fragmented.
Concepts of Paved Roads (a.k.a. Golden Paths) helped them to provide guidance to teams with the aim to reduce team cognitive load while decreasing support load on central teams.

Join Dirks talk for lessons learned, impacts which they can already see and an outlook on what they envision in the Hyperspace.


Hyperspace follows the "Platform as a Product" approach, to take away redundant tasks from teams which can be managed centrally. Important for us here is that we don't mandate the platform, as we learned from our history that mandating tools, processes, ... leads to unhappier developers and worse results.
Core part of the Hyperspace IDP is our "Paved Road" offering which focuses on giving clear guideance to teams how to do certain tasks. These "Development Procedures" (how we call those guideances), are small value streams (having a trigger, x-steps and at least one clear defined value) which apply to many development teams throughout the company.
For the teams the Development Procedure provide clear guideance on things like compliance fullfilment, while safeguarding their tool and process invesments.

For us as a central platform team, we can now better align maintenance tasks and reduce our support efforts, with more and more teams joining our Paved Roads and our Hyperspace IDP.

Dirk is a DevOps evangelist and Continuous Delivery expert at SAP.

Since 2001 Dirk worked in various roles at SAP which mainly revolved around Development and Operations.
Together with his former team "TwoGo by SAP" he established the first Continuous Delivery implementation at SAP, delivering value daily to their customers.

In his current role, he is part of the CI/CD Product Management at SAP, helping SAP’s product teams on their CI/CD and DevOps journey.

Dirk is a frequent speaker at international conferences on DevOps and Continuous Delivery and co-organizer of DevOpsDays Zurich