Toyota builds an integrated DevOps platform at enterprise scale with Gruntwork & EPAM

‍Key results

• Decreased bespoke infrastructure and workflow sprawl, shifting away from custom infrastructure patterns toward standardized, versioned modules and best-practice workflows.
• The platform team supports more than 400 engineering teams (roughly 1,000:1 app-to-platform engineer ratio) while managing 1,600+ infrastructure repos. 
• Improved standing up a complete application stack in an hour.

“This partnership means a lot to us. We are not in the business of engineering a DevOps platform. We donʼt have that many platform engineers.ˮ
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– Toyota platform engineering leader

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Toyota North America operates at a scale where small infrastructure inconsistencies quickly become sprawling risks. The platform team’s job is to keep delivery moving, while making cloud foundations repeatable, secure, and easy for hundreds of teams to consume. 

A senior engineering leader on Toyota’s cloud platform and developer experience team has been a key driver of Toyota’s platform approach. The role sits between competing realities: numerous global teams shipping, a fast-growing infrastructure footprint, and limited bandwidth to build and maintain bespoke infrastructure tooling long term.

Toyota faced compounding technical debt, including tooling version caps and security exposure tied to outdated IaC workflows. At the same time, the organization needed a better way for teams to discover proven infrastructure patterns and use them without reinventing the wheel. 

Managing infrastructure complexity at scale with a reusable foundation

Toyota’s challenge was not a lack of talent or ambition. It was scale. When you support more than 400 engineering teams and manage 1,600+ infrastructure repos, “close enough” infrastructure standards become expensive, fast. Toyota needed consistent patterns that could be adopted broadly, without requiring a large platform team to hand-hold every team through the details. 

The core requirement was straightforward: create a platform experience where developers could browse a service catalog, scaffold what they needed, and rely on standardized workflows to deploy and manage infrastructure. Toyota also needed that platform to be realistic for a lean team to operate and maintain long term. 

Early on, developer experience suffered because the initial infrastructure tooling required deep platform knowledge and frequent manual intervention from the platform team. Developers were frustrated by complex workflows and uncertain infrastructure patterns that varied across teams.

Teams also built significant custom logic on top of existing pipelines, including cost rules, policy checks, and custom validations. Over time, that logic became difficult to maintain and harder to standardize.

Building and deploying a new platform through tight partnerships

That platform took shape as a partnership between Toyota, EPAM, and Gruntwork. EPAM built the internal developer platform using Backstage as the portal and service catalog. Gruntwork provided the backend infrastructure foundation. Behind that UI, Toyota leaned on Gruntwork’s IaC Library modules as building blocks, Terragrunt for orchestration, Gruntwork Pipelines for standardized deployment automation, and Gruntwork Account Factory for standardized account provisioning and baseline guardrails.

• Gruntwork’s IaC Library modules are the backbone for how Toyota teams turn platform patterns into usable blueprints.
• Terragrunt orchestrates infrastructure workflows across repos and environments.

A Toyota cloud platform leader described Gruntwork’s libraries as foundational to Toyota’s blueprint approach, which uses templated IaC to implement architectural patterns in the cloud.

Early on, the focus was consistency and repeatability. Eventually, those standards became the default way teams provisioned and managed infrastructure, reducing the need for one-off workflows and ad hoc pipeline logic. 

As the IDP matured, individual development teams could own their repos and workflows with clearer, more consistent patterns. Reusable modules and blueprints reduced guesswork and reduced the need to reinvent infrastructure patterns team by team.

At the same time, the platform team could still impose guardrails and policy centrally through standardized modules, account baselines, and deployment automation.

Standard patterns that support speed, security, and developer experience

As Toyota’s platform footprint expanded, the goal was to improve delivery speed without growing sprawl, version fragmentation, and security gaps. Paying down the technical debt from outdated IaC tooling and custom workflows was also important. 

The team addressed both by pushing best practices down into the foundational layer: standardized, versioned infrastructure modules; orchestration conventions; and automated deployment patterns that teams could reuse rather than invent. 

The same approach supported developer experience. Toyota’s goal was not only to keep the platform team lean, but to make day-to-day workflows simpler for application teams. Toyota set an explicit productivity bar: get closer to an experience where a complete application stack can be stood up in an hour through automated scaffolding and catalogs. 

That matters because the platform team cannot scale linearly with the rest of engineering. Toyota’s platform team maintains an approximately 1,000 to one app-to-platform engineer ratio, while still improving developer experience. 

Individual development teams were able to take ownership of their repos and day-to-day workflows because the IDP gave them a clear self-service path. Backstage made the approved options discoverable through a catalog, and the backend enforced consistency. Teams could ship without waiting on the platform group for every change, while still staying inside the same patterns and controls.

What Toyota plans to build on next

Toyota’s platform trajectory points to broader adoption and reuse. Take what works for a large internal audience and extend it further across the organization. This results in a platform team operating at a size and repo count that few tier-one enterprises sustain cleanly. 

• Backstage provides the “front door” developers use to find and scaffold infrastructure capabilities. 
• The IaC library provides the “golden path” building blocks that standardize outcomes across teams. 

Toyota’s internal platform work shows what “enterprise scale” looks like in practice: 1,600+ infrastructure repos, 400+ engineering teams, and a platform group that still aims to make infrastructure provisioning feel routine for developers. After a successful implementation for their North America organization, Toyota now plans to standardize on the Gruntwork solution across the entire enterprise.