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 →
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 →
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.
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 →
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.
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 →
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.
Director of Product, Platform Developer Experience, Spotify
Tom Barkan-Benkler is a Director of Product Management at Spotify, leading Backstage's product team and Spotify’s cross-disciplinary developer experience team. Tom Started his career 17 years ago as a developer, founded two companies as an entrepreneur, and in the last 10 years... Read More →
Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), like Backstage, are becoming essential for enabling platform engineering in enterprises. These portals streamline developer workflows, centralize resources, and foster a self-service culture, reducing operational overhead. With the integration of AI, IDPs can further transform the developer experience through intelligent automation, predictive insights, and enhanced productivity. This talk explores how AI-enhanced IDPs are shaping the future of platform engineering, driving efficiency and innovation in enterprise environments.
Ben loves helping application development teams improve their productivity and achieve better results. He does this through listening, learning, and coaching - influencing individuals and teams in organizations all over the globe. His digital marketing expertise and many hours of... Read More →
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.
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 →
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.
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 →
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.
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 Head of Experience @ JPMC, focused on developer experienxe. She's worked with ~100 companies and organizations identifying and collaborating on best practices, methodologies... Read More →
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 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 →
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 →
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!
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 →
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.
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 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 →
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.
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 (she/her/hers) is a Senior 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.
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.
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 →
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.
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
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.
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 →
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.
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 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 →
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.
Lizzie Salita is a Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Chief Technology Office, where she serves as Product Owner for the company’s Backstage developer portal and as a strategist focused on enhancing developer experience and driving technical reuse across the company. With... Read More →
