26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Bring Data Visualization in Backstage - Olivier Liechti, Avalia Systems
Software analytics is analytics on "software data", with the objective to give development teams insights about their codebase, their work practices, their collaboration patterns. "Software data" is all the data that is already available in the tools they use on a daily basis: code repositories, issue trackers, CI/CD pipelines, observability tools, etc.
Visualization of "software data" is relevant to an effective and enjoyable developer experience. It is useful to get insights, track progress, maintain awareness about technical and non-technical issues. It also makes the user experience visually pleasing.
The goal of this session is to share how we have brought software analytics and data visualization to Backstage. We first look at the overall architecture and process of extracting, storing and presenting information. We then take a closer look at the "last mile" and present the open source toolset that we use to create visualizations. In the presentation, we demonstrate a Backstage plugin that we have created to bring Vega.js visualizations in developer portals. We introduce the notion of "visualization grammar" and illustrate it with concrete examples.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Bring Data Visualization in Backstage - Olivier Liechti, Avalia Systems
Software analytics is analytics on "software data", with the objective to give development teams insights about their codebase, their work practices, their collaboration patterns. "Software data" is all the data that is already available in the tools they use on a daily basis: code repositories, issue trackers, CI/CD pipelines, observability tools, etc.
Visualization of "software data" is relevant to an effective and enjoyable developer experience. It is useful to get insights, track progress, maintain awareness about technical and non-technical issues. It also makes the user experience visually pleasing.
The goal of this session is to share how we have brought software analytics and data visualization to Backstage. We first look at the overall architecture and process of extracting, storing and presenting information. We then take a closer look at the "last mile" and present the open source toolset that we use to create visualizations. In the presentation, we demonstrate a Backstage plugin that we have created to bring Vega.js visualizations in developer portals. We introduce the notion of "visualization grammar" and illustrate it with concrete examples.
- 1 participant
- 31 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Building an Internal Developer Platform with Backstage Plugins - Taras Mankovski, The Frontside Software, Inc
What does a Heroku-like developer experience look like on an Internal Developer Platform built with cloud-native tools? The answer to this question was elusive for a long time. It's now coming into view as many organizations start thinking about how they can allow developers to deploy to their platforms from Backstage. In this talk, Taras Mankovski will describe the five deployment use cases that an Internal Developer Platform built with Backstage should support to provide a Heroku-like developer experience. We'll cover the following use cases, 1. Creating a service that automatically deploys to the platform 2. Editing secrets and automatically redeploying the service 3. Deploying a branch to a new environment 4. Accessing logs 5. Seeing resources that a service consumes For each use case, Taras will present a solution that a Backstage adopter can implement with existing Backstage plugins.
Building an Internal Developer Platform with Backstage Plugins - Taras Mankovski, The Frontside Software, Inc
What does a Heroku-like developer experience look like on an Internal Developer Platform built with cloud-native tools? The answer to this question was elusive for a long time. It's now coming into view as many organizations start thinking about how they can allow developers to deploy to their platforms from Backstage. In this talk, Taras Mankovski will describe the five deployment use cases that an Internal Developer Platform built with Backstage should support to provide a Heroku-like developer experience. We'll cover the following use cases, 1. Creating a service that automatically deploys to the platform 2. Editing secrets and automatically redeploying the service 3. Deploying a branch to a new environment 4. Accessing logs 5. Seeing resources that a service consumes For each use case, Taras will present a solution that a Backstage adopter can implement with existing Backstage plugins.
- 2 participants
- 27 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Enabling Developer Experience Journey in U.S. Bank - Ravikumar Tadikonda & Poonam Garg, U.S. Bank
In our journey, we learned that if you want your software product to succeed, the developer’s satisfaction and happiness are crucial. Happy developers create outstanding software in the long term. Positive experience makes them feel secure and motivated to work on excellent products and services. At U.S.Bank, we are building a single point of truth for the product life cycle, which includes creating, discovering, and maintaining the product/application for every technical, security, auditor, and leadership team. In this talk, we will cover the Journey of Backstage Adoption. We will highlight a few things that have enabled our engineering developer productivity using features such as catalog, technical documentation, software template & homepage.
Enabling Developer Experience Journey in U.S. Bank - Ravikumar Tadikonda & Poonam Garg, U.S. Bank
In our journey, we learned that if you want your software product to succeed, the developer’s satisfaction and happiness are crucial. Happy developers create outstanding software in the long term. Positive experience makes them feel secure and motivated to work on excellent products and services. At U.S.Bank, we are building a single point of truth for the product life cycle, which includes creating, discovering, and maintaining the product/application for every technical, security, auditor, and leadership team. In this talk, we will cover the Journey of Backstage Adoption. We will highlight a few things that have enabled our engineering developer productivity using features such as catalog, technical documentation, software template & homepage.
- 10 participants
- 38 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
How We Scaled Catalog Ingestion to Hundreds of Thousands of Entities - Damon Kaswell, HP Inc.
When you need to ingest over 100,000 entities from a data source, you can't just point a Catalog Processor at it and hope for the best. Through a combination of careful planning, properly scaled computing resources, and some clever customization that extends the basic Entity Provider and Catalog Processor functionality, HP Inc. is successfully ingesting hundreds of thousands of separate entities, proving that Backstage is truly ready to scale for the large enterprise. In this presentation, I will:
* Describe the scope of the technical challenge. HP Inc. is using Backstage for many different types of entities from many different sources.
* Do a deep technical dive into how our entity ingestion works, and how we have extended the base Entity Provider mechanism with multiple features that allow us to handle extremely large sets of data.
* Talk about considerations such as entity validation and relations.
How We Scaled Catalog Ingestion to Hundreds of Thousands of Entities - Damon Kaswell, HP Inc.
When you need to ingest over 100,000 entities from a data source, you can't just point a Catalog Processor at it and hope for the best. Through a combination of careful planning, properly scaled computing resources, and some clever customization that extends the basic Entity Provider and Catalog Processor functionality, HP Inc. is successfully ingesting hundreds of thousands of separate entities, proving that Backstage is truly ready to scale for the large enterprise. In this presentation, I will:
* Describe the scope of the technical challenge. HP Inc. is using Backstage for many different types of entities from many different sources.
* Do a deep technical dive into how our entity ingestion works, and how we have extended the base Entity Provider mechanism with multiple features that allow us to handle extremely large sets of data.
* Talk about considerations such as entity validation and relations.
- 1 participant
- 39 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Keynote: Building for Developer Happiness - Dave Zolotusky, Principal Engineer, Spotify
Now almost 15 years into the cloud computing revolution, we know that — while new technologies, architectural patterns, and engineering org designs solve a lot of problems for developers— they create some new ones too. When new stuff is introduced as tech becomes smarter and more powerful, complexities arise and cognitive overhead increases resulting in a bad developer experience. Even agile approaches reach their limit. And everyone feels the pain.
As the world’s largest audio streaming company, Spotify has grown rapidly over the last decade and definitely hasn’t been immune to these trends. But instead of slowing down during growth as most companies do, Spotify has been accelerating in its product development with developer retention rates that are well above industry averages.
In this keynote, Spotify will share more on its culture and focus on better developer experience, which is — in a nutshell — really about making developers happy at work.
Keynote: Building for Developer Happiness - Dave Zolotusky, Principal Engineer, Spotify
Now almost 15 years into the cloud computing revolution, we know that — while new technologies, architectural patterns, and engineering org designs solve a lot of problems for developers— they create some new ones too. When new stuff is introduced as tech becomes smarter and more powerful, complexities arise and cognitive overhead increases resulting in a bad developer experience. Even agile approaches reach their limit. And everyone feels the pain.
As the world’s largest audio streaming company, Spotify has grown rapidly over the last decade and definitely hasn’t been immune to these trends. But instead of slowing down during growth as most companies do, Spotify has been accelerating in its product development with developer retention rates that are well above industry averages.
In this keynote, Spotify will share more on its culture and focus on better developer experience, which is — in a nutshell — really about making developers happy at work.
- 1 participant
- 6 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Keynote: Providing a Curated Experience for Developers with Backstage - Valentina Alaria, Sr. Director, VMware Tanzu
Conversations with our customers reveal that a unified interface for accessing a curated catalog of developer tools, services, templates and APIs is critical for developer productivity and happiness. Developers want to start writing code as quickly as possible, platform engineers want to ensure the software produced meets enterprise requirements and quality standards so they can support scalability.
As these conversations were happening we began to notice the innovations coming from a dynamically evolving community around Backstage. We quickly recognized it as the right technology to enable better outcomes for our customers in the areas of developer experience, release velocity, and software quality. With Backstage, platform engineers can provide a curated experience that is consistent and flexible enough to meet different developer teams’ requirements.
In this talk Valentina Alaria, Sr. Director of Product Management for VMware Tanzu, will share how VMware incorporates Backstage into our flagship platforms, why the curated experience is a core tenant of Tanzu, and how it’s enabling developer velocity and happiness.
Keynote: Providing a Curated Experience for Developers with Backstage - Valentina Alaria, Sr. Director, VMware Tanzu
Conversations with our customers reveal that a unified interface for accessing a curated catalog of developer tools, services, templates and APIs is critical for developer productivity and happiness. Developers want to start writing code as quickly as possible, platform engineers want to ensure the software produced meets enterprise requirements and quality standards so they can support scalability.
As these conversations were happening we began to notice the innovations coming from a dynamically evolving community around Backstage. We quickly recognized it as the right technology to enable better outcomes for our customers in the areas of developer experience, release velocity, and software quality. With Backstage, platform engineers can provide a curated experience that is consistent and flexible enough to meet different developer teams’ requirements.
In this talk Valentina Alaria, Sr. Director of Product Management for VMware Tanzu, will share how VMware incorporates Backstage into our flagship platforms, why the curated experience is a core tenant of Tanzu, and how it’s enabling developer velocity and happiness.
- 1 participant
- 12 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Leading Architectural Change with Backstage - Andy Hoffman, Caribou
Yesterday you’re a scrappy startup; today you’re funded and have 12 months to 10x your team and system capacity. The platform, process and architecture doesn’t translate, “the database” is about to fall over, and dozens of new engineers are motivated to innovate in countless different directions, some more stable and secure than others. In this, or any time of change, how do you make sense of the chaos and stimulate the evolution of architecture, processes and platforms without crushing the startup spirit? Backstage, combined with a CNCF stack is a driver of platform scale, stability and governance while still encouraging freedom and innovation. In this session, you’ll hear lessons learned on a DevOps journey to recent unicorn status, with practical strategies for technical and leadership strategies for leading change through Backstage without bureaucracy, and running new services in prod in 5 minutes.
Leading Architectural Change with Backstage - Andy Hoffman, Caribou
Yesterday you’re a scrappy startup; today you’re funded and have 12 months to 10x your team and system capacity. The platform, process and architecture doesn’t translate, “the database” is about to fall over, and dozens of new engineers are motivated to innovate in countless different directions, some more stable and secure than others. In this, or any time of change, how do you make sense of the chaos and stimulate the evolution of architecture, processes and platforms without crushing the startup spirit? Backstage, combined with a CNCF stack is a driver of platform scale, stability and governance while still encouraging freedom and innovation. In this session, you’ll hear lessons learned on a DevOps journey to recent unicorn status, with practical strategies for technical and leadership strategies for leading change through Backstage without bureaucracy, and running new services in prod in 5 minutes.
- 4 participants
- 33 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Lightning Talk: Talking in Backstage: How to Navigate the Business and Engineering Vocabulary - Jorge Lainfiesta, Roadie
Backstage aggregates more than technologies, services, and software components: it brings together cultures from different teams and countries. But the old adage says, naming is hard. It all came crashing down for me when a frequent Backstage contributor asked me “what is a Developer Portal.” Then as you zoom into the framework, you find types, kinds, labels, tags, processors, collators, and many other terms brought from different contexts. It can be daunting for frequent Backstage users to grasp its full potential—and express its business value—when just reading about it is exhausting, let alone for new users. In this talk, I’ll present three personas to dissect how we talk about Backstage. Then I’ll present a structured Backstage vocabulary drawn from my experience talking regularly with several adopters and contributors, all set in the wider Cloud Native context. By the end of this talk, attendees will feel more confident about talking about Backstage and will be eager to explore areas that seemingly cryptic terms kept them away from.
Lightning Talk: Talking in Backstage: How to Navigate the Business and Engineering Vocabulary - Jorge Lainfiesta, Roadie
Backstage aggregates more than technologies, services, and software components: it brings together cultures from different teams and countries. But the old adage says, naming is hard. It all came crashing down for me when a frequent Backstage contributor asked me “what is a Developer Portal.” Then as you zoom into the framework, you find types, kinds, labels, tags, processors, collators, and many other terms brought from different contexts. It can be daunting for frequent Backstage users to grasp its full potential—and express its business value—when just reading about it is exhausting, let alone for new users. In this talk, I’ll present three personas to dissect how we talk about Backstage. Then I’ll present a structured Backstage vocabulary drawn from my experience talking regularly with several adopters and contributors, all set in the wider Cloud Native context. By the end of this talk, attendees will feel more confident about talking about Backstage and will be eager to explore areas that seemingly cryptic terms kept them away from.
- 1 participant
- 11 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Measuring Developer Happiness: Analytics for Backstage - Eric Peterson, Spotify
So you're deploying Backstage at your organisation. You're making a bet that Backstage will move the needle on your engineering productivity objectives and you're investing time and resources to see it through. How do you know that bet's paying off?
Join Eric as he demystifies the process of gathering insights from your Backstage instance by offering an in-depth introduction to the Backstage Analytics API. Backstage adopters will learn how to start collecting usage data, and what key metrics to be focused on. Plugin developers will walk away with practical advice and context on how to surface more useful data to adopters.
Measuring Developer Happiness: Analytics for Backstage - Eric Peterson, Spotify
So you're deploying Backstage at your organisation. You're making a bet that Backstage will move the needle on your engineering productivity objectives and you're investing time and resources to see it through. How do you know that bet's paying off?
Join Eric as he demystifies the process of gathering insights from your Backstage instance by offering an in-depth introduction to the Backstage Analytics API. Backstage adopters will learn how to start collecting usage data, and what key metrics to be focused on. Plugin developers will walk away with practical advice and context on how to surface more useful data to adopters.
- 4 participants
- 26 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
The Evolution of Backstage Backends - Patrik Oldsberg & Johan Haals, Spotify
Join the maintainers of Backstage on a deep dive into Backstage backend's past, present, and future. In particular it will explore the evolution that was first presented in RFC #11611, which aims to improve many aspects of developing and deploying Backstage backends. The talk will explore the existing system and what the maintainer team has learnt from it, and then move on to introduce the evolved system and how it aims to improve the lives of anyone that touches Backstage. As a by-product of these discussions, listeners may also learn a thing or two about building scalable augmentable systems and TypeScript API design.
The Evolution of Backstage Backends - Patrik Oldsberg & Johan Haals, Spotify
Join the maintainers of Backstage on a deep dive into Backstage backend's past, present, and future. In particular it will explore the evolution that was first presented in RFC #11611, which aims to improve many aspects of developing and deploying Backstage backends. The talk will explore the existing system and what the maintainer team has learnt from it, and then move on to introduce the evolved system and how it aims to improve the lives of anyone that touches Backstage. As a by-product of these discussions, listeners may also learn a thing or two about building scalable augmentable systems and TypeScript API design.
- 7 participants
- 28 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
Welcome + Opening Remarks - Suzanne Daniels, Spotify & Martina Iglesias Fernandez, Roadie
Welcome + Opening Remarks - Suzanne Daniels, Spotify & Martina Iglesias Fernandez, Roadie
- 2 participants
- 9 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
What We Learned During Our Journey in Using Backstage at DAZN - Marco Crivellaro, DAZN
Getting Backstage up and running locally is pretty easy, however, this is just the first step of a long journey that presents some challenges. To get the most out of Backstage, you will need to find the best way to populate its software catalog based on your company's needs and you will have to choose which plugins to use to make it effective. Another important aspect that will present its own challenges is how to capture engineers’ interests and drive its adoption across the engineering community. This talk will present how we implemented Backstage at DAZN, it will touch on the technical and social challenges that we faced and how we overcame them. We will also see how we are leveraging Backstage to foster contributions for both internal and open source plugins.
What We Learned During Our Journey in Using Backstage at DAZN - Marco Crivellaro, DAZN
Getting Backstage up and running locally is pretty easy, however, this is just the first step of a long journey that presents some challenges. To get the most out of Backstage, you will need to find the best way to populate its software catalog based on your company's needs and you will have to choose which plugins to use to make it effective. Another important aspect that will present its own challenges is how to capture engineers’ interests and drive its adoption across the engineering community. This talk will present how we implemented Backstage at DAZN, it will touch on the technical and social challenges that we faced and how we overcame them. We will also see how we are leveraging Backstage to foster contributions for both internal and open source plugins.
- 3 participants
- 24 minutes
26 Oct 2022
Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.
What is This Tech Insights Anyways? - Jussi Hallila & Irma Solakovic, Roadie
Demos of tech insights show how you can track and visualize the engineering standards using Backstage and what benefits those can provide for your company. In this talk, we’ll take a deep dive into the tech insights present in the open source Backstage codebase to show you how to set it up to enable it to help manage your tech health. You will learn what are the moving parts that build up the whole concept of tech insights. Jussi will demonstrate what are the possibilities with the current architectural design of the feature. You will also learn how to extend the built-in functionality to provide your own data sources, your own components to visualize tech insight data and how to drive your company’s engineering standards with tech insights. At the end of the talk, you will have seen practical examples of the capabilities of the tech insights functionality and how those are built. With the knowledge gained from this presentation, you should be comfortable extending the functionality present in the open source project and mold it to satisfy your needs.
What is This Tech Insights Anyways? - Jussi Hallila & Irma Solakovic, Roadie
Demos of tech insights show how you can track and visualize the engineering standards using Backstage and what benefits those can provide for your company. In this talk, we’ll take a deep dive into the tech insights present in the open source Backstage codebase to show you how to set it up to enable it to help manage your tech health. You will learn what are the moving parts that build up the whole concept of tech insights. Jussi will demonstrate what are the possibilities with the current architectural design of the feature. You will also learn how to extend the built-in functionality to provide your own data sources, your own components to visualize tech insight data and how to drive your company’s engineering standards with tech insights. At the end of the talk, you will have seen practical examples of the capabilities of the tech insights functionality and how those are built. With the knowledge gained from this presentation, you should be comfortable extending the functionality present in the open source project and mold it to satisfy your needs.
- 3 participants
- 28 minutes
