 Good morning. Today we'll be talking about IDP tips and tricks for platform engineers. In this case, the P stands for portal and not platform because this is BackstageCon. I hope you're all caffeinated, even though after this opening that kind of revved everything up, I'm pretty sure that we're all awake. We'll be talking about the pains that IDP solves. Why use Backstage, which is a question that I was talking about with somebody earlier on, and give you a few tips and tricks that we think will help you move along with Backstage. But let's start with introductions. My name is Oshrat Nir. I am a storyteller, a lifelong learner, a self-professed yogi who is more flexible in mind than body. And I'm also the developer advocate for Armo and Cubescape. I am at Oshrat N on all the socials where I exist, so feel free to catch up with me. With me is? Hi, everyone. I am Guy Menachem. I am a solution architect at Commodore, CNCF ambassador, and I'm leading the platformers community. We are doing a lot of content around Backstage, and I'm really excited to be here. For the last year, I've been working a lot on Backstage, so I'm very excited. OK, let's get started. We all feel pain. Backstage solves some of that pain. What it does at kind of a very high business level that all of our bosses will like is that it increases software quality. Well, that helps us, too, because DevOps people don't have to wake up at night. And it speeds up deployment velocity, which is, again, another great business KPI. But if we are to think about our own personal pain, it reduces cognitive load, and it improves our productivity, which is a good thing. And don't just trust me. Expedia implemented Backstage, and they were very, very careful with their KPIs. And this is the stuff that they found after about a year of working with it. They were able to ship stuff successfully on day one. They found that there was less context switching. Yay, right? Nobody wants to do that. And there's increased reach and usage of docs, which is important because it promotes independence of developers. And again, it helps with the speed. So why Backstage? I can shut up and just show you the logos. I mean, everybody wants to be one of these big companies. They're pretty successful. We all know them. But just in case it's not about the love of the logos, let's start with the fact that it's open source, right? It's open source. It's got a vibrant community. We all love open source. That's why we're here. Apart from that, it can be customized to your exact needs. Everybody in this room is a snowflake, right? You agree with me, right? And you can use themes. You can use extensions. And you can use plugins to make it yours. The last thing is that it's scalable and extendable. So one of the tips that we'll be talking about and returning to, so I feel free to put it here, is start small and scale up. It will grow with you. And you will scale the learning curve together with the portal. Lastly, and I guess this is something that I found online when there was a question of why backstage. Somebody, people said that it's really hard to implement. And it's a big deal. And why not build our own? And not built to your syndrome. We've all suffered from it at one point. The idea is this. Backstage is a framework. It's a canvas. You can make it your own. Implementing it initially for the first time may be a little hard. The thing is that with the new plugin system, what happens is you do the heavy lifting at the very, very beginning. And then it starts to speed up. And that is the important point. And Guy will take it away from me now. Thank you, Osh. Thank you, Osh, Rod. So plugins, right? Everybody using plugins. But now they're becoming much, much easier to work with. So as you mentioned in the previous call, the new plugin system. And what's the current state? Like everyone using today backstage knows that plugins require kinds of heavy lifting. You need to take the code. You need to install the package. Sometimes the repo is not the repo of Backstage. So you need to bring the code for some other repo. And this is why they're running the community repo for plugins. And then you need to integrate that. In most of the tutorials, you need to add code to it. And that's kind of heavy lifting, especially that we know that people that are running Backstage in most organizations are coming from non-Java speak background. And what's really amazing about the new plugin system is that it allows you to really plug plugins. You can take the image of Backstage. You can add your own plugins to it without changing the base image you're working on. Not the base image of the container, but the base image that's actually running and being deployed. And that's amazing, because now instead of creating something that we thought to be extension, it's going to be a real extension, extension point within the code. And that's going to change the approach with plugins. And what we're going to do today is that we're going to show you tips of how you can use plugin and how you can do a lot of things in Platform Engineering in order to elevate the new plugin system for that. So one of the main things that we want to talk about is continuous optimization. And we want to start with success. Like, everyone here using Backstage want Backstage to be successful. We want people to use it. We want our management to love the project and to invest more resources in it. And for that, we need usage, because if no one is actually using the portal, so we will not be able to actually show any success. And after we do that, we provide some value in it. So we add value to the portal. We hope that we are going to have usage. But the fact is that even if we invested a lot of time and resources to make it valuable, it doesn't really mean people are going to use it. And that's really interesting, because one thing is actually missing in this diagram, and it's the data. If we have enough data, we are able to actually understand how people are using the portal, and then we can actually prove our success. And adding data to Backstage is easy. We are going to talk about three steps. Now we are going to build our analytics and data in Backstage, and now we are going to do that. So we are going to start with the most straightforward way, and we are going to extend it as step by step. So the first thing is that we can integrate Analytics tool. It's kind of baked into Backstage. You may need to install one of the packages, for example, the Google Analytics one. And pretty out of the box, you can get Google Analytics dashboard of your usage of Backstage. And you don't need to work a lot in order to get it instrumented. And that's super valuable, because we can get Google Analytics. They are perfect in optimizing website, and make sure you are using them more and more, and get it into our deployment. So that's the easiest way. It's kind of pretty out of the box. And this is the first step. And for the first step, we are going to use that one. But we can extend it a little bit more. We got also the Insights plugin. And what the Insights plugin allow us to do is basically to bring usage insights into the Backstage portal. So let me show you a little bit how it looks. It's a plugin made by Spotify. And it's allowed you to understand much much easier how much people are actually using. So you know, like, where are the peak days, what happened during the weekends. And based on that, understand what is the usage pattern, and how much users you have on a daily basis. So if you are deploying a portal, you can go into someone and say, oh, we have 100 daily active users in our portal. So we're becoming a product management metrics and a successful metrics that we can use. And by the way, because it's in the portal and it's not some in a hacky way, and like, go to that good analytics, we will have your credentials for that, they actually get it on their own without you involved. And it's not only usage. You can also understand which plugins are the most useful ones. And maybe you launch a project to invest on there. Suncheck plugin, which we are going to talk about later, people are not really using it. Maybe we need to refine it. Maybe we need to invest more time. And that's allow us to actually take decision to make it much, much better. Obviously, if you're using the tech docs capabilities, adding docs into Backstage, if people are not really able to search them, they are kind of unuseful. So you're able to understand how much search you have and how much people are actually using that. But it's not the last step for analytics, right? Sometimes we do have events that actually triggered in the portal, but we want to add some attributes to it and we want to create some correlation that are not intuitive. And this is the most advanced level because then you need to go to the code and actually change the attributes of the events fired within the system. So we start from the basic, we are going to add an analytics tool. We are going to make sure that we have analytics somewhere and get out of the bot dashboard. We can add the analytics plugin to make it much more advanced. And then we can also change if we need more data and then to refine our data. And that's how we can continuously optimize toward what's going to be a successful portal and how we can prove our value using the portal. And the next thing we are going to talk about is quality. And the power that Backstage brings is that allow us to define quality standards within the organization. So, and I truly believe that quality is something that every engineer like. Like we do like to provide and deliver high quality products. But the problem is that it requires resources. In order to deliver that, we need a lot of resources and we need to invest time. But if we can bring quality into the organization and make it out of the box, we can actually leverage and elevate the standards and the quality standards within the organization. And that's super powerful. And now we are going to do that. And we are going to do that by three simple things. It's going to be load slowly, but it's going to be loaded. So, in Backstage, we got the templates ability which allow us to define templates. And basically, get them, I don't know what it will be loaded eventually. And what's interesting about them is that if we are able to define high quality templates toward the organization, people can create high quality service out of the box. They can maybe get tests in them. Maybe they can get, I know, SREBAS practices embedded into our templates, into our services, into our repos. And here we can find an example developed by AWS. So, they launch a plugin called OPA. And what they added to it is the ability to create and generate generative AI applications. And most of us, pretty early in the stage of creating high quality AI applications. And, but how can we make it high quality? Maybe we can take the AWS templates, we can use them, and then deliver our own high quality AI application within the organization. So, anyone who wants to embed AI can use those templates and create high quality standard application. So, it can be to AI, it can be to microservices, it can be to a new thing developed. Whatever you like, you can use them templates and leverage that quality. The next thing is SCARCORDS. So, what we want to do is to reflect quality. We cannot control it all the time. We can create the templates, people use them, and then it's kind of maybe removed, maybe they change the checks. But SCARCORDS allow us to reflect and show users what quality their services at. It can be multiple options. So, for example, we can show them the test coverage of their services or microservices. We can show them the security, how much secure their services. Also the incident, the reliability score, everything regarding about the scoring of the services will be reflected to them. And we can do that in multiple levels. We can do that in a team level. How good is my team? Obviously, no one would like to be on the lower score of the team scoring cards. We can also reflect that by services or applications, and then understand where we are standing at. And that's a good thing because people really looking for that, first of all, if you are using your APIs, they want to know that you can provide high-quality APIs to be used. But on the other side, they do want to know they can trust on you. And this is the trust certificate for that. And the last level of quality is SoundCheck. And SoundCheck is a plugin that allow you to basically embed checks into your portal and make sure people understand what is tested and then get a certificate on that. So this is a different plugin that can be used. And what we can see on the screen is, first of all, what is the bronze level tier looks like and which tests are going to be tested. And what is really useful about it is, first of all, we reflect the quality by score. And then we allow users to understand what have we tested in order to define the score and what they need to do in order to make it much, much better. And in here, we can see, for example, how a bronze tier looks like and also our silver tier looks like and what they need to do. For example, they need tests to be passed on the CI. And from that, we can leverage, teach them, let them understand how they can get into high-quality standards of engineering. We see that use case many, many times, especially with SREs trying to enforce high-quality standards into the organization. We can see that from security teams trying to bring security into the microservices, but they don't know exactly how to do that. And that is a key capability. So let's start from the first point. We want to integrate some scoring mechanism. We can leverage scorecards, or we can leverage sound check, allow us to go deeper into the check. Or we can configure sound check. So it can be configured by code-based. So we can define the check and make them run. Or we can actually create them from the UI. It really depends. Obviously, we don't want people to remove the quality checks of their own. And that can be a real problem. But it's really easy to define. For example, a service without a readme or without a catalog file, it's going to be failed. And that's really, really important. And the third tip of the day. So one thing that really draws the attention of people into backstage is the ability to create this single pane of glass, a platform or a portal that people will be able to go into it and actually see everything. And that's really important because sometimes during the implementation, they tend to not actually complete that. They tend to overload the data into the portal and make people not get enough value out of it. So what we want is basically to add all the relevant data sources for the services into the portal and make sure that they get an overview based on all the data we can get. And that's super valuable because we know that in every engineer organization, there are more than 10 or 15 systems that developers need to go through on a daily basis. And we want to integrate them into a single place so they can get overview of all of them at once. Cool. And what is that? So what is interesting about those plugins is that vendors and companies and open source projects actually allow developing the plugins for you and you just pick them, grab them, add them, configure them. Kind of an easy job using the new plugin system. And based on that, you can get the plugins into your system. And we can see the research by Robdy. And you can see how many plugins are used by how many companies. And we can see the on-page, per-gd, tech radar. All those plugins are very popular. So and now we can see a trend very recently that all the vendors in the industry kind of running after creating more and more plugins into their own system. And that's kind of amazing because that's allowed us to create a single pane of glass. And how can we do that? So we have the backstage plugin website. We can see all the website. And we can integrate everything from CD systems to observability systems to funny dev quotes that we can add in order to get some funny dev time when we get into the portal. Also, if you want to add even check into the portal and adding genai powered chat, everything can be done. And there are really a lot of plugins. So you can use them. And that's super powerful. And based on that, you can build your own portal, creating everything you like on this canvas. And see that, for example, we can run the CubeSpec plugin to get security or to get reliability score from Commodore, Datadog, ArgoCD, the relations and about created, intentionally like originally by backstage, everything in a single pane of glass. And any one of you can basically build what they want on their own. Now it's a good time to summarize just what we saw. So we talk about the single pane of glass. And now we can want and embed more and more plugins. And we have a few minutes for questions. So are there any questions from the audience? Oh, over there. There is a mic pretty close to you. So there are stands with mics. Oh, OK. Thank you very much. Good morning. I have a question regarding the plugins, because I'm a newbie to backstage. And I have the feeling it's always you need to build the complete image every time you need to configure a new plugin. Do you plan on the roadmap to make it more dynamic maybe? Thank you. Yeah. So this is what the new plugin system is all about, is to take the static configuration or the static way that you had to add the plugins, build the image, and then deploy it, and move it to a way when you can deploy one image and then add the plugins after. And that will make it more similar to our plugins used in other system that you know. Any other questions? Oh, over there. Maybe this is just a point of clarification. But some of these cards on the screen here, are those all part of open source backstage, or does this also include maybe some of the paid plugins? So some of them, for example, the Cubescape is open source of all. It will be open source. It's still very much an alpha stage, but we'll get there. OK. And I was specifically looking at the Cubescape, Argo CD, Gattadog, Cards. So Argo CD is fully open source. If it's an open source project, so the plugin is always open source. In most of the cases, the plugins are open source, but sometimes you need to add it to a paid product. So you need to pay for the product, and the plugin is for free. And I said that, and it's really critical, like almost all of the companies in the market investing in those plugins. So if there is no plugin available, we see a big trend of people trying to add it. Sometimes it's the company itself, and sometimes it's the open source initiatives just for the plugin. Yeah. And I just want to reinforce what Guy said about that. I mean, Cubescape and Argo, and many of these are open source projects. So if you need a plugin, we can build it within the community. You don't have to wait for it to come out. I think I got confused about when Scorecard was brought up, as well as transitioning into these other plugins things. So you can use scoring and quality in different ways. So Scorecard is one of them. And those plugins, which are more in the overview page as for different ways of doing that, you can decide whatever you like. So this is the nice thing about it. You can integrate one plugin, take one component from it, and then integrate another plugin because you want capabilities from the other one. And what's really cool about backstage is this mix and match. So you can mix and match whatever you like in order to get into your desired state at the end. This? Nice. I actually have two questions. The one that I wake up my curiosity was those gen AI environments. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit more about them? Because I honestly didn't get what actually template is capable of building in the end. And the second thing is the usage of these cards and sound checks, can we already use some kind of metrics besides it, especially besides these Scorecards? Any kind of metrics already provide the users this and that? So basically those are two questions that I have. So we'll start with the gen AI example. So the gen AI is just an example of how we can deliver high quality application templates into the organization, even if some people in the organization are not a subject expert of that matter. So for example, creating gen AI application is something that we all want to do, but it's very hard. So what AWS did, they just created a template, something that you can plug into your backstage and use the plugins and then spin up gen AI application. So what it essentially does, it will create the AWS resources. This isn't that example, but it can be whatever cloud provider or whatever Kubernetes provider you want, it's just an example of creating all the resources you need in AWS to spin up open AI or AI application connected to a database. Is it clear? So wait, if I understood correctly, does that also allow me in some kind of ways to even build on top of it my, let's say, clusters or something to this AI? So you can take the template and do whatever you like. This is just one example, but there are other examples out there, and you can always create your own templates based on what you want to get, obviously, on your cluster or whatever cluster you like. OK, OK, OK. OK, yeah, we're at time, so thank you for the really insightful questions. You can talk to Guy and myself after and throughout the conference. We will be hanging around Commodore Booth, the Armo Booth, the Cubescape kiosk, so come find us and talk to us. But let's just kind of close this landless plane. Wrong metaphor for backstage. OK, sorry. Think of backstage as a canvas, and you can build it and enrich it with plug-ins that suit your needs. And follow the example of these top performing companies that are using backstage to reduce the cognitive load, to increase quality, and to speed up deployments. Thank you so much for coming this morning.