The Saga of Orchestrating a Seamless Developer Experience at Maersk

Abstract

Maersk is a global leader in transport and logistics, connecting transportation with technology through integrated digital platforms. While Maersk builds the backbone of the global economy, our Platform Engineering team creates the infrastructure that powers it. Our goal is to provide developers with a unified Internal developer platform called the Maersk Developer Platform (MDP), to build secure, reliable, and scalable applications without managing the underlying infrastructure themselves.

Before pursuing a world-class developer experience, we faced significant challenges, including excessive time spent on non-core tasks, inefficient onboarding, complex system integration, and manual on-boarding processes, affecting 4,500 engineers globally. We identified inefficiencies through GitHub analysis and surveys, engaged engineers to map their user journeys, and established five guiding principles to drive our North star vision: self-service, standardisation, adaptability, availability, and developer-centric design.

We developed MDP in-house from the ground up to provide our developers with a unified platform that simplifies governance and security, enabling rapid global app deployment and allowing engineers to focus on creating high-quality business applications. MDP integrates four key layers:

1. Infrastructure Resources: Core elements like cloud landing zones, networking, and security.
2. Shared Services: Capabilities such as databases, messaging brokers, and API gateways.
3. Service Orchestration: Provisioning and lifecycle management of shared services.
4. Developer Experience: Intuitive tools like CLI, APIs, and Terraform providers simplify access.

We started by building foundational capabilities, streamlining shared services, and centralising tools to reduce fragmentation. Temporal is central to MDP, enabling scalable and automated workflows across application runtime and infrastructure management, ensuring both efficiency and reliability.

We will talk about how Temporal plays a critical role in each of the above layers—automating application setup, repository creation, deployment workflows, and managing infrastructure provisioning and scaling across regions to ensure seamless operations.