CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024: Full Schedule

9:00am MST

BackstageCon | Welcome + Opening Remarks

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:00am - 9:05am MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:00am - 9:05am MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

9:10am MST

How to Grow Your Internal Backstage Community with Some Open-Sauce (Source) 🍝 - Djamaile Rahamat & Mitchell Hentges, Spotify

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:10am - 9:35am MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

You have your Backstage instance set up, the latest plugins installed, and Backstage is the hottest thing in your company. It's so popular that other teams are now eager to contribute and even develop their own plugins. Before you know it, you have a Backstage instance being worked on by multiple teams. While this is great, it also brings its own set of challenges. How do you define ownership? How do you review every pull request that comes in? How do you clean up unused dependencies, and more? Don’t worry! There are many tools in the Backstage open-source ecosystem that can help you address these issues. In this talk, we will cover additional tools from the open-source community that you can use to improve the developer experience for Backstage itself. We’ll discuss how to integrate these tools and also share how we are utilizing them at Spotify.

Speakers

Mitchell Hentges

Senior Engineer, Spotify

As the previous Build Team Lead of of Mozilla Firefox, I have a history of focusing on developer experience and system performance. This applies smoothly to the recent improvements my team has been applying to Backstage! I'm always happy to talk about software tools, system design... Read More →

Djamaile Rahamat

Software engineer, Spotify

Djamaile is a Software Engineer at Spotify, focussed on Backstage.

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:10am - 9:35am MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

9:40am MST

⚡ Lightning Talk: Keeping the Show Running: Backstage Maintenance from a Platform Engineer's Lens - Paul Schultz, Red Hat

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:40am - 9:50am MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

For developers, Backstage is a one-stop shop for all their software development needs. But what goes on behind the scenes to keep this platform humming? This talk delves into the intricacies of maintaining Backstage as a downstream product from the eyes of a platform engineer. Explore challenges like navigating dependency minefields and battling npm issues. Discover strategies for stability, including version pinning and automated updates with Renovate. Learn the art of monitoring and fortifying against security vulnerabilities. Gain insights and tools to conquer backstage maintenance, whether you're a seasoned engineer or a curious bystander. This presentation offers a glimpse into the backstage of Backstage, equipping you with invaluable insights for smooth operations.

Speakers

Paul Schultz

Software Engineer, Red Hat

Hi! I'm Paul Schultz, a Software Engineer at Red Hat. I started as an intern in 2021 and now work on open-source projects like Devfile and Backstage. As engineer for Red Hat Developer Hub (based on Backstage), I tackle maintenance challenges – dependencies, version control, automated... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:40am - 9:50am MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Beginner
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

9:55am MST

Sponsored Keynote: The Future is Backstage: Building a Better Platform from the Framework Up - Pia Nilsson, Spotify

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:55am - 10:00am MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

Every business is now a software business…and every company is now a technology company. The world of technology has become more fragmented than ever before — with workflows distributed across tons of tools, systems, and services. Additionally, teams are now distributed, and asynchronous collaboration has become the norm.

At Spotify, we believe that teams are most effective, and happiest, when the chaos is controlled so they can focus on innovating. That’s why we open sourced Backstage in 2020, and continue to invest in its future today. With Backstage, teams can spend more time innovating and delivering value to your organization — and a lot less on the noise.

Backstage’s success in open source — and its evolution as a mission-critical tool for Spotify’s R&D teams — has shown us that there’s opportunity to make that true not only for engineering teams, but for all the folks involved in developing software across your organization. In this keynote, we’ll dive into how Spotify is investing in the future of Backstage, and leading the way toward development best practices at-large.

Speakers

Pia Nilsson

Senior Director of Engineering & Head of Platform Developer Experience, Spotify

Pia is Spotify’s Senior Director of Engineering and Head of Platform Developer Experience, working tirelessly to provide the best experience for Spotify’s developers. She started her career as a backend engineer for 14 years working across telecom, pharma, retail, banking, and... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 9:55am - 10:00am MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

10:05am MST

10:40am MST

Backstage in the Board Room: What Makes a Digital Portal Helpful for C-Level Executives? - Olivier Liechti, Avalia Systems

Tuesday November 12, 2024 10:40am - 11:05am MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

Backstage is typically adopted by platform teams to solve engineering problems. Securing extended funding can be challenging if its broader business value is not clearly articulated. We present 2 case studies from the energy and insurance sectors where we have used Backstage to address questions from business stakeholders: Is our tech organization aligned with strategic objectives? Is our information system enabling key initiatives? Can we explain and measure how our tech teams deliver value? By driving the initiative with executive-level sponsors and extending Backstage with "business-oriented" features, we have demonstrated its value beyond an IDP platform. We share learnings from two projects, and demonstrate a set of new features: 1) the augmentation of the (static) System Model with (dynamic) concepts such as initiatives, 2) the design of a flexible measurement framework (for KPIs), and 3) the integration of Enterprise Architecture concepts and their visual representation.

Speakers

Olivier Liechti

CTO, Avalia Systems

Olivier is CTO at Avalia Systems, which he co-founded in 2016. His background is in applied research in software engineering, with a particular interest in human factors. Previously, Olivier was full professor at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland. Olivier holds... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 10:40am - 11:05am MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

11:15am MST

Empowering LLMs with Backstage: Broader Insights Driven by the Developer Portal - Niall Thomson, Amazon Web Service

Tuesday November 12, 2024 11:15am - 11:40am MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

Unlocking the potential of Generative AI for software development and operations requires access to diverse systems across an organization. In this session, we'll explore how Backstage, with its extensive ecosystem of plugins, can serve as a central hub for powering generative AI initiatives. We'll dive into how Backstage's ability to connect with aspects such as cloud cost management, security posture analysis, and incident management tools can provide valuable data to generative AI models. We'll present an architecture designed to leverage these existing community integrations to enrich AI models with contextual data and enable them to perform actions on behalf of the user in their existing single pane of glass.

Speakers

Niall Thomson

Principal Container Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Service

Niall is an Amazon Web Services solution architect specializing in container technology and Kubernetes. With a passion for building developer platforms that enhance efficiency and security he helps guide AWS customers on platform strategy and implementation, sharing his expertise... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 11:15am - 11:40am MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Technical deep dives on Backstage topics customizing+scaling+securing+plugin development+etc

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

11:50am MST

Panel: Insights from Internal Developer Portal Rollouts in Large Enterprises - Balaji Sivasubramanian, Red Hat; Srinivas Peri, Adobe; Serena Chechile, JPMC; Jay Cox, American Airlines; Lilit Yenokyan, Roku

Tuesday November 12, 2024 11:50am - 12:25pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

This panel features practitioners from industry leaders like Adobe, American Airlines, Roku, and JPMC discussing their experiences in boosting developer productivity through internal developer portals (IDPs). The session dives into how large enterprises with thousands of developers evaluate, onboard, and scale IDPs. Hear from experts about their strategies for optimizing the developer experience and effectively deploying IDPs at scale. Gain insights into challenges encountered during Backstage IDP rollouts and best practices that drive successful adoption. The panelists will share practical examples and approaches that can be adapted by your organization to implement IDPs for your developer community.

Speakers

Jay Cox

Principal Engineer, American Airlines

Platform Engineer at American Airlines

Serena Chechile Nichols

Developer Experience, Head of Design & Research, JPMC

Serena has 35+ years of experience in PM, UX and development, as an individual contributor and leader. She is an Executive Director of Global Experience @ JPMC, focused on their developer portal. She's worked with ~100 companies and organizations identifying and collaborating on best... Read More →

srinivas peri

Director of Engineering, Adobe

For the past 7 of my 20 years at Adobe I've been part of Ethos, where I lead the Developer Experience engineering group. My teams deliver capabilities for service frameworks, provisioning, CI/CD, observability, diagnostics, developer support, and the Adobe Developer Portal (based... Read More →

Balaji Sivasubramanian

Head of Product, Developer Tools, Red Hat

Balaji is the Head of Product, Developer Tools at Red Hat, where he leads the development of products to address the needs of developers, including Red Hat Developer Hub (based on Backstage.io) and Podman Desktop. Before joining Red Hat, Balaji served as the Executive VP of Product... Read More →

Lilit Yenokyan

Director of Engineering, Developer Experience, Roku

Lilit Yenokyan, the current Director of Engineering at Roku, is pivotal in identifying and enhancing productivity for engineers throughout the company. Before her tenure at Roku, Lilit worked with leading tech companies including Microsoft, Meta, and Netflix, as well as multiple startups... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 11:50am - 12:25pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

1:30pm MST

The Lego Approach: Leveraging Reusability for a Seamless User Experience - Ashna Malhotra & Mesut Yilmazyildirim, Booking.com

Tuesday November 12, 2024 1:30pm - 1:55pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

Tired of a disjointed Backstage with inconsistent plugins? We'll share best practices for a unified, user-friendly experience! Learn how to create reusable components for streamlined development and a cohesive look. Discover how to integrate your company branding for user familiarity. We'll delve into using Storybook for clear documentation and explore strategies for accepting contributions to your components, fostering collaboration. Leave this session with a plan to build a seamless, visually appealing, and collaboratively developed Backstage for your engineering teams!

Speakers

Ashna Malhotra

Technology Innovation Advocate, Booking.com

As a Frontend Engineer at Booking.com, I have a keen eye for resolving complex problems through innovative solutions. I don't just develop features; I ensure they address real pain points using best practices. My experience spans from internal tools to customer-facing products. I... Read More →

Mesut Yilmazyildirim

Technical Product Manager, Booking.com

Product Manager

Tuesday November 12, 2024 1:30pm - 1:55pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

2:05pm MST

Centralized Compliance: Automated Governance Inside of Backstage Developer Portals - Amber Beasley & Daniel Hagen, Liatrio

Tuesday November 12, 2024 2:05pm - 2:30pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

While Backstage already excels at displaying information about repositories registered as components, this talk will explore how to enhance Backstage by integrating Automated Governance results into the repository information. With these results readily accessible, you can easily determine which releases are passing or failing the Automated Governance policies and quickly identify the reasons for any failures at a glance. We will cover the development and use of reusable custom plugins and open-source libraries for Backstage to seamlessly display Automated Governance results. This integration not only improves visibility into the compliance status of your releases but also helps address future releases to ensure they meet the required policies.

Speakers

Amber Beasley

Senior DevOps Engineer, Liatrio

Amber is a Senior DevOps Engineer at Liatrio, specializing in DevOps workflow optimization, automation, and team dynamics to streamline software development processes. Amber excels in implementing solutions across diverse platforms and cloud environments, empowering teams to achieve... Read More →

Daniel Hagen

Senior DevOps Engineer, Liatrio

Daniel works at Liatrio working with Fortune 100 clients to develop platforms and modernize applications. As an owner of numerous industry and project management certifications, Daniel contributes to more than 20 Open Source libraries, and systems images. In addition, he is highly... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 2:05pm - 2:30pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Beginner
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

2:40pm MST

Scale the Adoption and Delivery of Backend Plugins Using the New Backstage Framework - Avantika Iyer & Emma Indal, Spotify

Tuesday November 12, 2024 2:40pm - 3:05pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

We’re over a year in since the new Backend system was rolled out, unlocking the extensibility and customisability of Backstage. Whether you’re a Backstage plugin developer or an adopter, tune in to discover the advantages of working within the new framework. For plugin authors, learn how to:

Extend and provide customisations for your backend plugin with extension points
Break your plugin’s functionality into modules
Connect these pieces back together into a fully functional plugin with plugin metadata

Designing your plugin with these features will make it easier for the community to adopt it and configure it to their own needs.

For adopters, discover how the new system drastically reduces the time to install new plugins and customise them with little to no code. With a few examples, we will illustrate how migrating to the new framework can make your backstage instance serve new functionality to your users quickly.

Speakers

Avantika Iyer

Senior Software Engineer, Spotify

Avantika Iyer is a Senior Software Engineer at Spotify, working across the stack on Backstage's open source and commercial products. She likes product engineering that is driven by customer needs and feedback and brings in a wide range of experience from small startups and multinational... Read More →

Emma Indal

Software Engineer, Spotify

Emma Indal (she/her/hers) is a Software Engineer at Spotify, originally from Gothenburg, Sweden. She has been a member of the Backstage team at Spotify for the last 4.5 years.

Tuesday November 12, 2024 2:40pm - 3:05pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

3:20pm MST

DevEx and Productivity Metrics on Backstage - Do's and Don'ts - Yishai Beeri, LinearB

Tuesday November 12, 2024 3:20pm - 3:45pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

If you're already running a Backstage based IDP, it makes a lot of sense to use it for showing dev productivity metrics and developer experience signals as well. Before you start simply pushing DORA metrics to your IDP, you might want to look at some common gotchas. This talk with review some pitfalls around exposing dev productivity metrics in backstage, and how to avoid them. We will cover best practices for maximizing the value and actionability of what you're sending to the IDP. We'll talk about how to use benchmarks to anchor your data with context; leveraging a/b and control groups to make a point; and how to enable drilling down to learn more about a data point, and how to enable the various personas that will consume these metrics. Finally, we'll talk about where to get started and how to then take it to the next level.

Speakers

Yishai Beeri

CTO, LinearB

Yishai Beeri loves to solve problems, and that’s why he was so fascinated with programming when he first encountered Logo back in the 80s. The possibilities seemed endless. In 2014 he joined a fast-moving cloud security startup, later acquired by a networking giant. That's where... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 3:20pm - 3:45pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

3:55pm MST

Backstage Adoption Deep Dive - Navigating the Pitfalls - Himanshu Mishra, Harness

Tuesday November 12, 2024 3:55pm - 4:20pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

As a Platform Engineer, your team just completed a technical review and decided that your organization needs to adopt Backstage. What do you do on the day one, in the first week and the first month? Do you start by moving all of your applications from your CMDB into the Catalog, or do you sync with your HRIS system to bring Users and Groups first? Even though no two Developer Portal in different organizations look the same, there are a lot of commonalities in the success stories. And the red flags leading up to a humble but unsuccessful adoption are also well known. In this session, we'll explore what does that paved path to Backstage adoption look like in 2024. What are some of the pitfalls to look out for, the challenges to expect for and the mitigation path. What are the different responsibles shared across different platform teams, engineering leaders and team leads. We'll explore both the cultural and the technical side of the adoption and some of the success stories out there.

Speakers

Himanshu Mishra

Staff Product Manager, Harness

PM responsible for Harness IDP, based on Backstage. Previously Backstage Core Team at Spotify as an Engineer and DevRel for Backstage Open Source. Twitter/GitHub: @OrkoHunter

Tuesday November 12, 2024 3:55pm - 4:20pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

4:30pm MST

IDPs For The Rest of Us: Maximizing Impact When You Aren't a Tech Giant - Eric Irwin, Quantum Metric

Tuesday November 12, 2024 4:30pm - 4:55pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

In todays platform engineering landscape, conventional wisdom suggests that the justification for building and maintaining an internal developer platform (IDP) is closely tied to the size of the engineering team; However, this overlooks critical factors such as platform complexity, integration needs, and the efficiency gains that can be realized even within smaller teams. Smaller teams now have the ability to stand on the shoulder of giants and build on a strong foundation which reduces the overhead and cost for building and maintaining an IDP, regardless of the size of your organization. But how do you begin and what does the path to successful implementation look like? Drawing from our own experiences, we’ll discuss how adopting Backstage has streamlined our development processes, cultivated a self-service culture, and enabled us to manage the complexities inherent in platform development.

Speakers

Eric Irwin

Senior Director of Engineering, Quantum Metric

As Director of Engineering at Quantum Metric, Eric has managed multiple Platform Engineering teams focused on Developer Experience, Site Reliability Engineering, and Platform Quality Engineering. He spearheaded the adoption of a self-serve platform, streamlined delivery processes... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 4:30pm - 4:55pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

5:00pm MST

⚡ Lightning Talk: How the Radius Dashboard Leverages Backstage to Build Visualizations of Cloud-Native Applications - Will Tsai & Ryan Nowak, Microsoft

Tuesday November 12, 2024 5:00pm - 5:10pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

When we set out to build a developer dashboard to accompany the Radius application platform, we were very impressed with how much of an accelerator Backstage proved to be. Our goal was to build a UI so that users could interact with their deployed applications and environments. Since we're not frontend experts, we needed a framework that allows us to build a dashboard with minimal effort, is customizable, and offers an ecosystem of extensibility--all of which Backstage provides. Moreover, the Software Catalog and Software Templates core plugins in Backstage align well with the application-centric development model that Radius aims to provide, making it a natural choice for building the Radius Dashboard. This talk will explore how the team leveraged the Backstage platform to accelerate development of the Radius Dashboard, and how the plugin implementations of the Radius application graph visualizations paves the way for deeper integrations within the Backstage ecosystem.

Speakers

Ryan Nowak

Incubations Architect, Microsoft

Ryan is an architect working on open-source projects from the Azure CTO's office. He's passionate about designing software for humans, incubating risky ideas, releasing them in open-source so everyone can benefit. At Microsoft, he's had a 15+ year career building developer-centric... Read More →

Will Tsai

Principal Product Manager, Microsoft

Will Tsai is a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, where he works in the Azure Incubations team building open-source projects that address developer challenges in the cloud-native space. Before joining Microsoft, Will held various product and program management roles at Amazon... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 5:00pm - 5:10pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

5:15pm MST

⚡ Lightning Talk: Countercultural: Backstage for Consultants - Lizzie Salita, Booz Allen Hamilton

Tuesday November 12, 2024 5:15pm - 5:25pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

In 1914, Booz Allen Hamilton pioneered the field of management consulting. Today, we are trusted as the largest provider of AI to the federal government. Our goal is to provide technically differentiated solutions that solve complex client problems at scale, and to do that, we are championing a culture of internal reuse. This includes applying InnerSource principles, through a Backstage developer portal, to improve velocity, quality, and DevEx for a technical workforce of 14,000. InnerSource principles of transparency and self-service can be at odds with corporate hierarchy, program silos due to varied client contracts, and the “need to know” mindset required when handling classified information. To get the best of both worlds, our Backstage team has learned to lean into that tension and deploy change management techniques to build community and rally support for new ways of working. This session will explore corporate barriers to Backstage adoption and lessons learned along the way.

Speakers

Lizzie Salita

Chief Engineer, Booz Allen Hamilton

Lizzie Salita is a Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Chief Technology Office where she currently serves as Product Owner for the company’s Backstage developer portal and as a strategist for developer experience and technical reuse. Her background in software engineering... Read More →

Tuesday November 12, 2024 5:15pm - 5:25pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

5:25pm MST

BackstageCon | Closing Remarks

Tuesday November 12, 2024 5:25pm - 5:30pm MST

Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

Tuesday November 12, 2024 5:25pm - 5:30pm MST
Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom FHJ

BackstageCon

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon