Cloud Native Computing Foundation BackstageCon NA 2022, 26 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: Lightning Talk: Talking in Backstage: How to Navigate the Business and Engineer... Jorge Lainfiesta

Description

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.

A

All right, uh hello, everybody I am here today to talk about talking in backstage which it feels a bit of an Inception thing, but the the the why the reason why I want to talk about this is because, a few months ago I was talking with uh backseat contributor, and he asked me what is a developer portal and I was like oh well.

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Boxes does create supposed to make it's a firmware for making developer portals, so that got me thinking of how there's like a maybe a disconnection of how we talk about boxes in different scenarios or to different people, because people have different interests and uh well I'm doing this myself, I'm Jorge Fiesta and before I used to have no problem with people uh running away from me, but nowadays, uh when they see that I have the marketing name in my title, developers just want to leave the room, uh but no I'm I'm not going to sell you.

A

Anything I just want to talk about talking in backstage, because words are important and they carry a lot of meaning and I got confronted with this, because recently I was commissioned to write the introduction to Backstage Court by David foundation, so that got me confronted uh with having to explain backstage to an audience who has not been Expo been exposed to anything that we are so used to, and the reason why it might be tricky to talk about backstage is because adopting backstage is an organ of passing initiative.

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To do it right you, you have to go all the way in uh to get the most valuable out of it, and it is very significant because we are going to put uh people who have never met working together, sharing the knowledge sharing software with other people in the organization and it's going to create a lot of possibilities, but also it's going to make us find out that there's things that we didn't know were working as expected, and everybody has their own objectives.

A

Just because we have backstage doesn't mean that everybody is aligned all of a sudden. They will keep having their own context. Their own priorities and that's why the way I want to frame these Concepts uh that I'm, oh, what I'm going to do, is to provide a little glossary uh and to do that. I want to take into account three personas. First are the Edwards, which is most of the people in this room. We touch backstage with our hands.

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We get dirty, trying to set it up and then for it to be a really a success. We need sponsors people who are ready to support backstage at a larger scale and push it at the organizational level and then it's the most important part of Backstage adoption, which are the users uh without developers using backstage. It would have no point to set up the scuff folder and the templates and all of this, so it's really important that we can come.

A

We can get our point across of why they should use backstage, because how we saw on the previous talk q, a developers just don't trust this. It's like! Oh, are you offering me this I? Don't trust you I have to see it with my own eyes and that's something that we have to get them to go through. So I want to present a very brief uh backstage glossary, because I only have very few minutes.

A

I actually don't know what the time is so I'm just gonna go through it as I can- and this is also something embedded in the grand tradition of the cncf. The cncf has its own glossary uh for things called native, because all of these are new terms. So it's hard to come to somebody and be like hey how's, your entity going it's like I, don't know we have to have some some more clear idea of what things are.

A

So the following definitions are going to be more of a broader scope rather than technically they want to communicate uh what it does. So several people that are not embedded in the backseat Community can get an understanding of what we're talking about. So the first one is backstage. What is backstage backstage uh the way you see it?

A

It's a framework for building developer portals that promote discoverability and autonomy, and it's important for me for people to understand that backstage is a framework work, because I have witnessed a lot of people who get frustrated because they run the create backstage CLI and then, oh, my whole company is not running on a unified developer platform. No because you have to make it your own, so that's I think an important point to communicate when talking about backstage next. Word is uh developer portal.

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This is also a New Concept that has emerged, and it's still shaping uh the form. You can still see it. You can already see several reports and Industry reports and people are starting to talk about this and the way I phrase.

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It is that it's a self-service One-Stop shop for everybody who wants to contribute to our ecosystem- and this is something that is not new before we have developer portals public developer portals for Apple uh there's what a developer portal, what you could access uh tool for developing documentation- and this is something that we are doing now for both internally. So it's uh everybody who wants to communicate do something for us. Any developer, whether it's an employee, a contractor another company, they can do so through the developer portal.

A

uh The next definition would be, then it's discoverability, and that is how easy is it to find something- and this seems like a kind of trivial thing written down, but the reality is that it's very difficult I have talked with. People could tell me that they take weeks or even I. Don't know it can take you a month to find out all the apis, all the tools, all the libraries to find.

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How do you build this new feature that you're asked to do because you have to go through slack and there are these people live in Japan and your office is in in Atlanta. You have to figure out how to get a hold of them uh to get even to know if they're logging method that they're using is going to be compatible with another API that somebody else wrote. So if this is taking you too much time, then you have a problem of discoverability. A bacteria can help you address this.

A

uh The next stop uh word in the glossary. Is software catalog uh software catalog is an instructor collection of software assets. The idea is that it's not just a list of things, because you can have hundreds of thousands of entities as we'll see uh soon in one of the talks, uh but you can build a kind of model, your ecosystem with backstage, and that is what makes it easier to navigate and go through what is very complex.

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It can be consumable by somebody who's new to the organization, for example, or a new country or a contributor that is, that is used to working with his team or her team, but now has to contribute with somebody else and they can see what are the affordances that they have available at the company. The next one is TNT.

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This is a horror movie, but it's not gonna, be a horror to work with entities. Entities are just the the unit of information stored in the catalog and I think this is.

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The identities are very important because at the end they are going to be a foundation on the information that we can consume in vaccines and depending on how we structure the entities, uh that's how we are going to be conceived, what's gonna be and resulting in the catalog, and you can just link so many things into the entities like documentation and all the integration is really a central piece of Backstage next is search and search is a way of discovering as well it's because developers not only want to see like oh here's the model of the ecosystem.

A

Sometimes you just want to know something and a natural way of doing it searching it. But if you have to go through GitHub and your Internal Documentation and to go through all kind of cloud providers trying to find just how to use the API, then it becomes difficult to even get started. So what I think this is one of the biggest features of boxes that you can have different sources and search across them.

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So you can actually discover more easily what you want without having to go of through the overload of uh of going through an entire organization, because sometimes you don't even know what you are looking for. You just know a keyword and then you have to go through it.

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So I think this is a great thing that backstage provides next is plugins and backseat in backseat your plugins, not the regular plugin, where you just block functioning and it you add functionality in backstage plugins are your features and I think it's useful to say that plugins are features because then, when somebody's another team wants a feature in backstage because they want something for their analytics.

A

Instead of opening a feature request to your team, that is the backseat maintainer or the instant maintainer, um then you just say: oh to add a feature, you create a plugin, and then you can contribute that to your internal developer platform, and this is helpful for people to understand that they also own the developer portal. They can contribute back to it, which is a model that backstage promotes.

A

um Then it's self-service, uh which is uh just getting the resources that you need without having to ask anybody to give it to you without opening tickets or being in the amount of slack, to tell you how to use an API you're, setting up a meeting with 20 people to find out uh how to I, don't know authenticate to a certain Service. uh So the idea in backstage is that you can just get it yourself. Next is open source which is not free.

A

You still need to invest to make it work to make it your own and contribute that, because that's the only way to actually be to get the most value out of factory, because if you develop everything on private and never share Upstream, then the problem is going to be for you, because then you're going to be straying away from the open source part. And then it's going to be more extensive for you to keep up and View and drop outside being caught off the community, because you didn't contribute back.

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So it's actually an investment to work in open source and then the final word is community, which is power, because this is what has led us here after Spotify uh shared on the uh it was very generous and they donated to the cncf boxes project. It became truly awesome, it's a public good and then we can all contribute to it and make it grow so fast as it has over the past few years. If you notice this is the biggest uh conference on the collocated events and backs is not even like a very old project.

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It's very new, but we have hundreds of adopters and people are always pushing it to do more things. So it's great that you all are here today and thank you for your your attention.