How Zoom built their enterprise demo platform with Windmill
Zoom's Global Architecture organization built a centralized demo platform on Windmill, enabling 60+ Global Architects to contribute workflows in multiple languages, supporting 400+ solutions engineers.
About
Zoom (NASDAQ:ZM) provides the AI-first, open work platform built for human connection and purposefully designed to move conversations to completion. From entrepreneurs to global enterprises, customers choose Zoom to seamlessly collaborate, communicate, and drive outcomes across meetings, chat, phone, contact center, events, and more — all with the built-in assistance of Zoom AI Companion. Their Global Architecture organization supports 400+ solution engineers who demonstrate these interconnected products to enterprise customers. With multiple products that rely on real-time APIs and complex integrations, the team needed a scalable way to create consistent, high-quality demo environments that could showcase Zoom's full capabilities to prospective enterprise buyers.
The problem
Unlike tools where you can quickly spin up a sandbox environment, demonstrating a comprehensive, real-time communications platform like Zoom presents unique challenges, as the real-time API requires displaying live messages, calls, and other dynamic elements.
"Zoom is an extensive platform with many interconnected components. The challenge is finding the balance between providing a fully-configured and lived-in demo environment that accurately shows Zoom's capabilities to our customers, and keeping those environments isolated from one another, ensuring changes to one demo don't disrupt another…all while limiting the amount of toil that goes into crafting these environments."
— Frederick Loucks, Demo Platform Product Manager
The traditional approach was unsustainable: every solutions engineer built their own demo environment, manually creating accounts and trying to maintain configurations that would resonate with each customer. This led to inconsistent quality, impossible scaling challenges, and valuable selling time wasted on demo infrastructure instead of closing deals.
Frederick's team was tasked with building a centralized internal demo platform, but the requirements were demanding:
- Complex API orchestration across 4 different Zoom API types (public, private web, back-office on-premise, browser automation)
- Polyglot language support, since the team works in Python, TypeScript, PowerShell, Bash, and Ansible
- Robust job scheduling to handle time-delayed tasks and create realistic content delivery
- Self-hosted on Kubernetes, with complete control in their AWS EKS environment
- Everything-as-code, with workflows backed by proper version control
"A big part of our team's strength is the broad and varied skills we possess as a whole. However, when it comes to building a platform and inviting contribution from everyone, that can be a double-edged sword. With so many different programming and scripting languages at play, we needed something that could bridge all of those skillsets without forcing everyone to learn a new language."
— Frederick Loucks
The solution
Polyglot language support for varied technical backgrounds
Zoom's Global Architecture team includes experienced engineers from a variety of backgrounds, with expertise in a wide range of programming and scripting languages. Windmill's support for Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, PowerShell, and other languages meant the team could leverage existing scripts with minimal refactoring.
# Example: Existing internal library wrapped in Windmill
from zoom_platform_lib import account_provisioning
def main(account_email: str, license_type: str):
# Business logic lives in separate library
# Windmill orchestrates
result = account_provisioning.create_account(
email=account_email,
license=license_type
)
return result
Advanced job scheduling for realistic demo environments
Zoom's most innovative use case — "drip hydration" — required sophisticated job scheduling. Unlike databases where you can insert data instantly, Zoom's real-time APIs require sequential message sending with realistic delays to create compelling demos that feel authentic.
"We actually use Windmill's job engine to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. We schedule future jobs into Windmill's job engine to handle some of these drip hydration tasks."
— Frederick Loucks
When a solutions engineer schedules a demo for next Tuesday, they kick off account hydration on Friday. Over the weekend, Windmill's job engine delivers fresh content at realistic intervals — chat messages trickle in, voicemails arrive, and documents get shared. By Tuesday, the account looks like it's been actively used for weeks.
Windmill as central orchestration layer
Windmill sits "at the center of everything" in Zoom's demo platform architecture, self-hosted in AWS EKS. The platform consists of a React front-end portal with Windmill Apps embedded via iFrame, allowing rapid feature deployment without front-end code changes.
"We can build things very quickly in Windmill, iterate very quickly, and we can ship them into a nice front end portal without needing to really modify the front-end code in any way."
— Frederick Loucks
This architecture enables self-service account creation, realistic account hydration through scheduled job execution, and citizen developer enablement for 60+ Global Architects who can now contribute tools and workflows in their preferred languages.
Git-backed workflows for team collaboration
With 60+ Global Architects contributing to the platform, version control and rollback capabilities were non-negotiable. Windmill's bidirectional Git sync provides both a system of record and the ability to revert commits when needed — critical for managing contributions from a large, distributed team.
The result
After over a year in production, Windmill has proven rock-solid for handling mission-critical workflows that support Zoom's entire sales organization. Today, 60+ Global Architects contribute workflows and tools, supporting 400+ solution engineers who use the platform for demos daily, all self-hosted on AWS EKS with complete infrastructure control.
The platform has automated the entire demo lifecycle: account creation and configuration, content hydration and population, API orchestrations across four paradigms, and custom tooling that enables citizen developers to build the tools they need. Zoom's sales organization can now deliver consistent, high-quality demos across 400+ solution engineers, scale demo capabilities without manual effort, and iterate rapidly on new features — directly supporting Zoom's revenue by ensuring every customer interaction showcases the product at its best.