 Welcome to the CUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024, live from Paris, France. Join hosts Savannah Peterson, Dustin Kirkland, and Rob Strecce as they interview some of the brightest minds in cloud-native computing. Coverage of KubeCon cloud-native con is brought to you by Red Hat, CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. The CUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024 begins right now. Good afternoon, cloud-native community, and welcome back to Paris, France. We are here at the fun and fabulous KubeCon cloud-native con, CNCF's largest event in Europe. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my fantastic co-host Rob Strecce. Rob, we are just powering through the evening. This is awesome. I mean, the energy is here. That's keeping us going. Yeah. And it's about to get crazy in here with the booth crawl. Also, I think we're getting there with all of this really good knowledge that we're sharing is just fantastic. It really is fantastic. And speaking of fantastic, we have two super fantastic Kube veterans on this desk. I feel like Balaji's been on camera almost as much as I have the last few months. And Natali, too. Great to see you again after our reunion in Amsterdam last time. How's the show going for you guys? You're all smiles. Yeah. I mean, I was a part of the backstage con yesterday. It was a co-host of the backstage con. It was really well. We had a large audience, like four or five of people there. It was a great event. Tell us a little more about that. Yeah. I mean, so backstage con is a pre-event in KubeCon last year. We had quite a number of people who were implementers like H&M, Bold.com. Oh, cool. Lots of customers were actually implementing backstage, but up on stage, talking about it. We also had the maintainers and the contributors, as well as other people talking about it. So it was a very nice event. It's a really community-inclusive experience. I mean, it was great because I actually got to go to some of it. And I was very intrigued by the guy from Spotify where he came in and he customized the colors and the patterns and showed like American Airlines and how they had customized it and things of that nature, which I think is just so smart to help organizations and platform engineering have their own brand within an organization. That's why backstage is successful. It's the ability to customize for your company. If you just say, like I said, the EU's IBM example. But you're able to customize the platform for you. That's why developers can associate with it. And it's not only the colors and themes. It's also what tools they can use, the templates, which is essentially the best practices for that organization can also be there. So that's why the backstage is resonating with the audience because it gives all the primitives to build something for you, for any user. That's why it's great. Natalia, I want to ask you a little bit more about those tools, software templates. You provide a lot of resources. Yeah, absolutely. Look, the community is also growing in this space. There's a momentum for platform engineering, a momentum for up-depth focus in Kubernetes community landscape. And so what backstage community is doing is providing a standard way to deploy software. It's so-called software template or golden path. Yeah, it's a way you can scaffold an application from scratch or adding a component to an existing application and give you on-ramp guidelines to set up a new environment, new tools, new framework. And it's also a standard way to deploy software, defined in a standard way. So we're defining a standard, and everyone is converging to this standard. That's why the community is so cool about this approach. And we've seen the momentum also yesterday in backstage con. Lots of people were there asking about the software template, IDPs. I observed, correct me if I'm wrong, the amount of questions were bigger. The backstage con was more crowded. I've seen that this community is really growing in this part. There's a little bit of a maturity even from Chicago to here. I think Chicago was more like earlier adopters. I mean, maybe it's Europe, but if you look at the people who raised their hands, 70% are already using backstage. We did a poll in the beginning. So that's pretty good. I mean, to have a conference where people are actually using it already, that's pretty good. That's a lot. I mean, that's pretty impressive. I mean, I thought it was more than 50%, 60%. Usually, I don't expect, I expect like 20%, 30%, but I would think it's more than 60%. I think Europe is very, very far adopting technology faster and better. I think it also helps from a resourcing perspective if you can bring things together. And I think this is kind of that, what is platform engineering versus what is the developer role and how is that going to play out? Because I kind of look at, you know, platform engineering is really the new IT. It's really where things get done to help developers. But is that what you guys are seeing in kind of your design focus with your products that are built on backstage? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Go, go, go. Yeah. So basically, we view this, I think there's two points to it, right? So the platform always existed. I mean, the platform is not a new concept. The IDP really helps to bring it together. So for the first time, the productivity of the developers actually increases tremendously because they have the ability to bring it together with something like an IDP, right? And IDP, just for those who are out there, is the developer portal is what you're talking about. That's a good one. So you're right. There's actually a little two words here. You can call that a whole platform as an IDP as well. But the portal is basically the UI for the platform. So for us, for me, that's where the rubber meets the road for the developers. It's really the personalization of the views, of the dashboards, of everything they want to do in one place makes it really interesting. Yeah. Anything more? Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to add that the platform engineers, the professional figure that really cares about the experience for developers. That's why this other thread called developer experience. And having a portal, internal developer portal, is a way to implement this developer experience. The platform engineer is actually the impersonification tree role, if you will. One is like being a product manager for the platform. There's a new model service from platform as a service. Now we are in a platform as a product fashion, if you will. So platform engineer, our product manager, are user experience expert because they follow the developer experience. And also they take my role, which is the coolest role in the world, which is the developer advocate. Those are kind of evangelists of the platform. Yeah. They help those developers be on-ramp with the platform, with the tooling, with the software template. So that's the platform engineer today. And also the platform engineer is an evolution of different roles that we have in the industry, DevOps, developer itself. And yeah, we're observing more and more platform teams into communities, in customers, in processes. That's a momentum. Yeah, well, and it's going to become more and more prevalent. You showed me a fun meme balaji before we got started with the platform engineer, taking the literal heat, the firestorm so that the developer can curl up peacefully and sleep. I love that. I'm going to be borrowing that and giving you credit moving forward. But I think that's really, it's an important way of looking at it, right? This user experience needs to continuously improve because we're in a super inflection point where orders of magnitude more data are about to be processed or starting to be processed. We've got different types of hardware. I mean, it's really interesting, honestly. So, in terms of empowering them, what's the feedback loop like with the platform engineering teams that you're building for? Thank you for this aliyap or so-called, yeah? I got you. Yeah, yeah. You know, we have these studies defining an ideal developer experience. So one pillar is reducing the cognitive load. The second pillar is getting developers into flow state. And the third pillar is the feedback loop. This is one of the most important part. And how we're connecting those, how to make this working is through the platform that enables this feedback loop early. So that you got the feedback from those users which are the developers and you can improve the platform. At the end of the day, if they improve the platform, you improve the process and you are giving the product in the end of your customer faster. So that's an improvement of a product. Everybody wins. Yeah, everybody wins. It's a win-win. Yeah, it's really a win-win. And also you break the famous so-called wall of confusion where developers don't talk to ops or DevOps because they don't understand each other. But here, here's the common languages. Software template, IDPs, collaboration, win-win again. Are you looking at it as this is how you're building out and you guys launched developer, the developer platform at Red Hat. How does this play into that and that launch? And that's new. It's brand new, by the way, since I've seen you in December, actually. I can take that one. So we launched a product called Developer Hub which is basically a commercial offering for backstage. So we are fully upstream compatible, allows you the customization and all the things we talk about. Because if you break that rule, nobody's going to buy the product. We want to keep the principle of being Switzerland, essentially, and also being able to customize it. So we have been in market for two to three months. We have a lot of customers already bought it with a large bank. It's 6,000, 7,000 customers. Going to go full stream on it and we're working to, obviously, enable them. It's a journey. You still have to put your custom templates and whatever the customization we're talking about. But yeah, definitely, it's resonating highly and we see a good way to do it. One point I want to add to it, the platform not only allows you to talk about dollar per experience, it also allows you to enforce things. This is one of my favorite topics, is the ability to supply software supply chain. Everybody talks about software supply chain, but then shift left is pretty obvious and you want to do security as closer to the dollar per possible, but it's hard to implement for every dollar per every time. So with the software template that we are coming out with, it's called the Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline Concept. That's another product we're launching which is basically codifying that and having that available out of the box. So instead of doing shift left and putting the burden on the dollar per, you're shifting down. So the infrastructure takes care of that. So the dollar per is like, they do a click and then they get that full, highly secure software supply chain ready made for them. That's basically reducing the effort and also getting compliance quickly. I was going to bring that up. Security, compliance, more important than ever. How are you building and working to help developers solve for that? I'm going to ask you, Natali, because I know it's a hot topic for you. Yeah, it's our topic and we need to, again, reduce the cognitive load for developers. Reduce complexity. How do we get the security in place so that it's simple for them? If you look at classical division of application lifecycle management, there's an onboarding phase, then there's a coding phase called inner loop, then there's a pipeline phase called outer loop. Those are phases, but security should be in all of those phases, from onboarding into project to deploying to production. How do we make that easier? Again, we think we're putting these security bits in software templates really make that easier, because Balazim was mentioning we're launching a new product called Trusted Software Supply Chain that will have parts containing the code verification, the code signing, and also a part that can sign container images, sign pipeline execution, verify with policy at runtime. So it's 360 degrees. How do we avoid the complexity for developers? If they use any IDPs, they can just create a software template to scaffold a new application, which is built in a secure way as defined. So the code needs to be in a certain way. The dependencies look at the supply chain security is also a very hot topic. How do you have an inventory of those dependencies? How do you scan those dependencies? Can you scan upfront? Can you provide those secure dependencies upfront? Yes, from the software template, you can provide the right dependencies and then you have all the tooling that helps you signing the code, signing the container image, signing the pipeline, verifying the policy, so that we think this might be a good option for developers. This is a great example of a platform engineering, really helping the development completely, right? So I think there's a huge value of that. The developers individually don't know how to figure all of these things out. They don't know which tool to use, what standards to follow, across a large company. I mean it would be an enormous catalog of knowledge you would have to have. And he's a Java developer, you know, a Go developer, he doesn't know any of these things, so having the platform engineering bring that huge value. This is going to turbo charge the organizational productivity and output. Well it's the on-ramp phase, right? Because you join a new company and you have to figure out what are the guardrails that this company has set up if you put it into the IDP and you put it into the developer hub it's a lot easier. Do you see I mean, I didn't even realize the uptick, I mean, 3 6,000 new customers is massive. I mean that's just unbelievable. When you start to look at that, are they looking at it as a way to make it easier for those developers just because the developers don't, to your point, on cognitive load, don't want to have to think about what are the guardrails every time. What are the pieces of security? And they shouldn't have to, frankly. So they're going through and using the different pieces that are, and maybe there are choices in there that they have to make so they're not pinned into one way. Is that what you're seeing best of breed kind of doing? I mean, I think that you can have as many templates as you want. I mean, obviously every developer, you have to have choice, right? Meaning you can't be the only way to do it. I expect a large audience to give choices, but not infinite choices or random choices everybody makes. Right now it's like free for all, right? You want to create a deploy application to AWS you're going to come in one way and he's going to come up with another way. So the thing is, you give a set of templates certain ways to do this thing and that's helpful. I think I expect that kind of like, not infinite but like a set. But yeah, that's definitely what I see happening. I think, yeah, I love that. And there's no reason it's like, we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time just let everyone get in the same basic car chassis and then customize your whip. In fact, in backstage is so good this plug-in ecosystem. There's a core and then a very rich ecosystem of plug-ins where that is bringing its own plug-in with core functionality like pipeline, get-off, single sign-on but then third party plug-in we're going to verify and certify the platform and really literally hundreds of community plug-ins that anyone can plug in because you know, it's important to connect to company's system and backstage it's really good at connecting to a really heterogeneous pool of systems. That's a really great point. I was just talking to a partner right now and I would name them right now but they're a feature-flight company and they are asking me which kind of plug-ins should we be building right? So I'm like, you know think of a developer life journey like he is using feature-flight obviously in his product what kind of information that should be exposed in this portal so you can see for example what is the feature-flight that's enabled in the production for this application. Maybe he said that's not what I want to do, maybe I want to turn off the feature so it gives that view like what I got pushed I can think about the life of a developer and this feature-flight is just one example of a tool but there are lots of tools you can use and you can bring all of those into the one single dashboard so the developer can actually do everything and that's a beautiful thing to do. Alright, you know what I'm going to close on the question I always ask you all since you're such regular guests and we have you on all the time what are you going to be able to what do you hope to be able to say when I have you on in Salt Lake or somewhere else soon that you can't currently say right now obviously not confidential but you know give us a little prediction, Natalia I'm going with you you got your smiles too big not too. Yeah, we were mentioning the process of the supply chain is coming very soon it's going to be GA the part with Trusted Artifact Signer and Trusted Profile Analyzer so this is coming soon and as far as I know Balachi can share more about the Red Hat developer hub but we have a really very good amount of plugins coming and feature you can share more. Well for me it's all about AI, you know how is the this experience could be turbo charged with AI because you know you can imagine we can go on for another whole hour on this easily and we will see it we did talk about it a little bit the thing is there's so much to do like these templates that you're talking about can I just create it by talking to it because you know like in the platform you can just do it can I talk about there's a lot of tribal knowledge you can just click click click click can I just talk to it what is going on with the what feature plugin enabled that's the thing there's so much you can do I'll give you one because you actually by looking at the templates being able to understand and go in there and figure out what templates have already been made for AWS for this service using this that's fantastic that would be awesome I hope to see that next time we're on absolutely, hopefully they can just talk to it and figure out which template is the right template for you that would actually be really awesome final thing before we wrap here you have an event coming up in Italy yep it's called Kubernetes Community Day Italy it's happening in June you are very welcome to submit any talk if you want to talk at our conference you're very welcome to attend the conference it's going to be in Bologna this year last year it was in Milan so if you come great talk great stuff great food so why you have to miss it come over I'm sold, I'm in we'll have to convince the crew to do Italy though I'm pretty sure this whole production staff would be very excited about that especially with the symbol being pizza a pizza pie it's so good great branding as usual they got the branding game sorted Bologna and Natali it is such a joy to have you on this stage thank you for being back I'm very confident I'll see both of you sitting here very soon and also Rob you just having a killer day 10 out of 10 and I hope you're having a fantastic day at home or wherever you're tuning in to our three days of live coverage here from Paris at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon my name is Savannah Peterson you're watching the Kube the leading source for Enterprise Tech News