How Swiss Post Achieved 5x Kafka Growth with 800 Users

Executive Summary

Swiss Post focuses on its customers. With this in mind, it also wants to modernize its systems and technology landscape to become a data-driven company—from the generation of data in the physical world to its value-creating use.

Swiss Post used Conduktor to expand data access throughout their organization and centralize control for their platform teams, and provide observability for data analysts and engineers.

Conduktor helped Swiss Post achieve the following results:

• Increased their Kafka applications from 60 to over 300
• Empowered 800+ internal users across all departments with secured access to Kafka
• Decommissioned legacy technology to improve governance, data quality, and reduce risks
• Built a foundation for AI and predictive models

Challenges

Swiss Post is handling millions of deliveries daily. With real-time data critical to operations—from sorting facility automation to customer analytics—Swiss Post faced an inflection point in its modernization journey.

The secure, trustworthy and sustainable handling of data, algorithms and technologies in line with customer requirements is an important success factor for corporate growth for Swiss Post and its digital business models.

To mitigate the increasing costs associated with legacy middleware integration licenses, the team pivoted toward an open-source, scalable architecture with Kafka as the foundation. Under Anke Raich's leadership, the platform team set a clear mission: migrate all integrations to Kafka, eliminate technical debt, and establish governance that accelerates delivery—rather than blocking it.

As Kafka adoption grew, so did the risks:

• High-stakes operations: Kafka powers critical processes such as sorting instructions in real time. Any misconfigurations or outages could halt sorting hubs.
• Access bottlenecks: Developers couldn't safely test or troubleshoot without the help of the platform team, risking delays or errors.
• Scaling pressure: As their Kafka environment grew from 60 to 300+ applications, and from 300 to 1,100+ integrations, the same platform team now had to support 800+ users.

One obstacle was a lack of visibility into Kafka clusters and operations. In order to perform root cause analysis and troubleshooting, engineers were forced into lengthy, awkward workarounds, slowing down crisis responses.

Lacking a centralized catalog of available data, analysts also were unable to discover and utilize data. They did not know which topic contained what information, and further, had no way to validate it easily. Teams had to rely on outdated or incorrect datasets, duplicated efforts, and generally left data unused.

This lack of visibility also created problems for the data governance team. While validating data quality (such as schemas and formats) was fairly straightforward, ensuring semantic quality (essentially context and accuracy) was harder. Version control was also difficult—differences between producers and consumers had negative downstream effects.

Solution

By adopting Conduktor, Anke and her team at the IT department of Swiss Post were able to reduce operational overhead, improve monitoring and visibility, and implement self-service abilities with centralization and guardrails—leading to more autonomy and faster innovation. Conduktor also enabled Swiss Post's data analysts, data scientists, and developers to expand real-time data usage across the organization, unlocking new use cases and harnessing the true value of their real-time data.

Regulatory compliance and full access control

Swiss Post utilizes Conduktor's granular role-based access controls (RBAC) to define clear roles and meet strict internal and regulatory requirements. Developers are only authorized to access the topics that their applications produce to (or consume from); data analysts and data scientists have time‑bound access for investigation purposes; and finally, platform engineers have full control and streamlined oversight. This structure is not just operational, it satisfies Swiss Post's internal revision team and ensures alignment with Switzerland's data privacy law.

Self-service and developer autonomy

Conduktor helped Anke's team become an in-house service for providing platform stability, security, and automation across Swiss Post. Since adopting Conduktor, Anke and her team have remained the same size, even as their Kafka deployment increased from 60 to over 300 applications, while users grew to nearly 800.

This user base includes approximately a third of all data scientists at Swiss Post and hundreds of analysts; the former use Conduktor to explore, discover, and validate real-time data for AI projects, while the latter use it to more rapidly find and fix data errors and anomalies. Best of all, every user can work independently, operating within the guidelines set by Anke and the platform team—without having to consult or rely on them.

Conduktor also supports teams that are at the forefront of Swiss Post's digital innovation efforts, including the team responsible for predictive geo-routing, where algorithms adjust delivery routes based on real-time traffic patterns.

Governance and observability

Conduktor also serves as a real-time control tower, providing additional visibility into data quality and accelerating troubleshooting workflows. Anke and her team built a Grafana dashboard to monitor the percentage of data that fell within the bounds of valid schema.

This additional visibility also facilitated Swiss Post's digital transformation. By modernizing their microservices architecture around Kafka and REST APIs (and utilizing Conduktor to provide governance, automation, and monitoring), Swiss Post saved a significant amount of money—but more importantly, they were able to gain reusability, security, and speed.

"Before, nobody tracked CMP classification" Anke says, referring to data classification workflows for new APIs and topics. "Now we audit and enforce it automatically during design."

Infrastructure management is another area where Anke and her team rely on Conduktor. "We have hundreds of connectors" Anke says, "and the whole monitoring and start/restart process is done with Conduktor."

Results

• 5× increase in Kafka applications — From 60 to over 300. Integrations grew from 300 to 1,100. The same platform team now supports all this and +1,000 topics in production.
• 800+ internal users empowered — Including developers, data scientists, and analysts with Conduktor.
• Hundreds of thousands saved — By decommissioning legacy technology while improving transparency, data quality, and governance.
• Increased AI readiness — Kafka now supports predictive models, with a third of their data scientists actively using Conduktor to explore, find, and validate data.
• Ensured compliance — With Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) by introducing role-based access controls that restrict data visibility to authorized teams.

Conclusion

With Conduktor, Swiss Post turned Kafka from a "black box" into a business advantage, providing security, governance, automation, and scale while maintaining usability. The platform now underpins mission-critical processes, accelerates real-time data access for hundreds of users, and lays a solid foundation for AI-driven innovation.

"Conduktor makes our Kafka platform not just usable—but governable and future-proof," Anke concludes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Swiss Post scale Kafka from 60 to 300 applications?

Swiss Post used Conduktor's self-service platform with centralized governance to scale from 60 to 300+ Kafka applications while keeping the same platform team size. Developer autonomy combined with RBAC guardrails enabled rapid growth without bottlenecks.

What role does RBAC play in Kafka governance?

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) was essential for Swiss Post's compliance with Swiss data privacy law. Conduktor's granular RBAC ensures developers only access topics their applications use, analysts get time-bound access, and platform engineers maintain full oversight.

How does Conduktor help with Kafka data quality?

Conduktor provides observability into data quality through schema validation monitoring. Swiss Post built Grafana dashboards to track schema validity percentages, with Conduktor enabling drill-down investigation of anomalies.