Past Events - Spring 2024

A crucial step for building a developer portal on top of Backstage involves the integration of Open Source plugins or the development of custom plugins. As the number of these plugins grows, one realizes that all the plugins will run in the same instance, potentially leading to limitations typical of monolithic applications. However, according to the official documentation this seems to be the way to go. This talk explores how the largest Backstage adopters managed to scale their instances to handle the load imposed by thousands of engineers. The session delves into an in-depth analysis of the internal architecture of Spotify's Backstage, uncovering how Spotify has successfully scaled an internal instance with over 200 plugins, effectively managing the daily demands of thousands of engineers. Additionally, the presentation offers insights into different approaches to scaling out Backstage, providing attendees with guidance to identify the best-fit method for their respective use cases.

Grab your Backstage pass and dive into the world of streamlined software development & developer experience. In this talk, we will dive into building your custom internal developer portal using the open-source framework Backstage. The talk covers the needs Backstage addresses and the core functionalities focusing on create, manage, and explore. We will see the power of Backstage’s plugin architecture, its core philosophy of abstracting infrastructure behind a single pane of glass, team autonomy, and clear software ownership. A live demo will showcase the versatility of the framework, and after the talk, you should have all the fundamentals to get started, join the thriving community of one of the fastest-growing CNCF projects, and build your first IDP using Backstage.

What do you do when life throws you a sudden curveball? How do you handle interview phone calls when you have lost the ability to hear? How do you deal with a client when you are unable to LIP-READ them? Laced with humor, a bit of despair, and real-life experiences, this straight-from-heart talk sheds light on the incredible role every single Ally can play and how encouragement and Allyship can go a long way in fostering inclusion and unlocking doors of opportunities!

DevOps is certainly not dead, but for many organizations it is on life-support. Poorly implemented processes, massive cognitive overload, and tooling complexity are causing under-staffed teams to struggle to achieve the expected productivity and efficiency gains. But it doesn’t need to be this way. As a passionate advocate for platform engineering, Steve has spent the last few years helping organisations improve their developer experience and turning “you build it, you run it” into a blessing, not a curse. In this session, he will be sharing platform engineering best practices and patterns, highlighting some pitfalls and anti-patterns and challenging received wisdom. He'll delve into (even) better GitOps practices, the importance of purpose-built, developer-focused platforms, and why it's time to transition away from Helm.

During this end user panel discussion, platform engineering experts from Boeing, Shutterstock, Adobe, and Vontage will share their journey building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Hear about their use cases, what they learned along the way, and which best practices and pitfalls they'd like you to take away.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of cloud native application deployments. But just like every tool, at scale, we start to see issues. In this lighting talk, Lauren Rother, VP of Product at appCD introduces Infrastructure from Code (IfC) and how both platform engineering and development teams benefit from using an application’s code to generate consistent, secure and compliant IaC.

When building an IDP, you have two primary goals. First, ensure stable infrastructure and second, make sure developers want to use it. In this talk by Stevie Caldwell, she discusses how you can use the open source tools, Goldilocks, and Keda to achieve these goals.

Everyone working in cloud native has figured out that in the microservices world, self-service is key to developing at scale. This is the whole point of the internal developer platform: give developers what they need for fast, low-friction, self-service development. Make the golden path easy.

Of course, your golden path should include secure, reliable, observable communications — so let's dive into how to be sure that it includes the service mesh! In this talk, we'll dive into this with Linkerd, talking about what sorts of things a mesh can make easier for the developer platform and how to make sure the developer platform is really bringing the power of the mesh to bear. Finally, we'll do a quick demo with Kubernetes, Linkerd, and Backstage. Join us!

Kubernetes is fast becoming the infrastructure base to build platforms, making the transition toward Platform-as-a-Product practices possible and ultimately necessary. This panel brings together platform experts to discuss hows, whys, and where we are headed, as well as the best way to get started on your platform-as-a-service journey (if you haven't already). We'll focus on actionable steps to ensure effective platform engineering, as well as:

• When (and why) do you build vs buy?
• Integration of best practices and new tools over time
• The most important roles different people will play on this journey
• And, as AI/ML continues to be the current tech revolution disruptors, we will discuss how they have impacted and will impact Platform Engineering

The age-old software debate of "build vs buy" isn't going away anytime soon because there are very real tradeoffs companies need to evaluate. Subscription costs vs employee costs. Risk of being beholden to a 3rd party backlog vs being unable (or unwilling) to keep pace with the need for new features. The security implications of on-premise deployments vs cloud hosted solutions. This is particularly challenging when it comes to internal tooling since this is often a business cost centre yet crucial to the effectiveness and security of the organisation.

Open source software (OSS) often strikes the perfect balance. Organisations are able to build using OSS to reduce their maintenance cost and increase their flexibility while always having the option to invest in maintainer led projects that can offload even more build costs over time.

In the case of internal developer platforms (IDPs), there is a potent combination of Backstage portals, Kratix platform orchestration, and Crossplane infrastructure orchestration which can enable almost any organisation to get started owning their own OSS solution with a manageable level of maintenance and support. This talk will describe the current IDP landscape both OSS and proprietary and demonstrate how the proposed OSS solution not only stands up to the challenges of proprietary solutions but out performs them.

When considering platform engineering, the decision between using a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution or creating an internal development platform depends on various factors. Both options have their advantages and drawbacks, and the best choice often depends on the specific needs and resources of your organization.

Internal development portals offer customization and seamless integration but require substantial time, expertise, and infrastructure. In contrast, SaaS solutions provide rapid deployment and reduced maintenance but may lack customization and introduce external dependencies, posing security and compliance risks.

This talk aims to provide attendees with a comprehensive framework for evaluating the trade-offs between IDPs and SaaS solutions. Drawing from real-world examples and best practices, we will examine solution deployment considerations such as resources, cost, flexibility, scalability, security, and user experience. By the end of the session, attendees will gain insights needed to make informed decisions that align with their organizational goals and priorities.

Enterprises that adopt OSS as the foundation of their internal developer platforms face the challenge of choosing technologies that will support their business outcomes long term. The cost of retooling and re-platforming for large organizations is high, which makes bets on specific technologies fundamental to their technology strategies. In order to de-risk these bets, enterprises take into consideration the investments of their peer organizations. Launched in October 2023, the CNOE (Kah - noo) project brings together enterprises (Adobe, Autodesk, AWS, Intuit,Twilio, Salesforce, Nike) to navigate these technology decisions together, de-risk their tooling bets, coordinate contribution, and maintain a reference implementation of our internal developer platform using CNCF technologies.

The CNCF Platforms Working Group places platform product management at “Level 3 - Scalable” in their platform maturity model, reinforcing that treating internal platforms as products is a key tenet of modern platform engineering.

Natwest Group, a British banking and insurance holding company based in Scotland, has been growing this capability within their Hosting Solutions team. This session will cover the why, what, and how of that experience. By bringing together a cross-functional team and working with experts in the Platform Engineering domain, the team has focused on choosing the right open source tools for the job and enabling co-creation of capabilities. Attendees will learn how they have focused on a GitOps approach and incorporated a range of tools, including Kubernetes, Backstage, Flux, and other open source technologies to define a set of patterns and enable platform users to have a seamless developer experience. The speakers will describe the progress made so far, the lessons learned along the way, and the next steps for driving innovation further.