 Hello, everyone. Good morning and welcome to backstage con 2024 Europe happening in Paris, France out of all places Whoo, make some noise. Hi Yeah It's the third time that we gather around backstage con like this and it's the very first time We're doing this in Europe So it's very very special and I know that many people in the room have been eagerly Awaiting and working really hard to make this moment Happen so I really hope that today is going to be Reddable and and memorable for all the participants who who made it here I'm really happy to see this many people here for it both adopters contributors users and and people just checking out backstage really and And yeah, when I said it actually got me curious like what's the what's the makeup of this audience today? Shall we find out? Let's do a quick show of hands Right. Why not? Cool. So let's get like this Please raise your hand if you're using backstage in your organization Wow nice nice amazing. Thank you Let's do another one raise your hand if you're contributing to backstage or maybe if you're Project maintainer for part of this project or maybe you're part of special group of interest Wow, quite a few quite a few. Thank you so much for keeping the project moving forward It's it's greatly because of you and the last one I promise please raise a hand if you're just exploring backstage or maybe running a proof of concept I Welcome welcome to this. Yeah friendly and hopefully warm warm community glad to have you here Cool, so regardless of your background and and regardless of your goal for today I hope that the programming Will will give you something that sort of matches with your interest We're gonna have a fair bit of Introduction we talks as well as technical deep dives as well as adoption stories and inspirational Keynotes and and writing talks So let's dive it in Now when we know you a bit better, maybe it's time to introduce ourselves as well your host for today So how do I my name is Helen? I work at Spotify where I lead an engineering team that works in backstage And yeah, I came all the way to from from Sweden to here and I'm joined by the wadji My name is Hey, my name is Balaji Siva and I lead the product management for the Dalper tools at Red Hat and happy to contribute to work with Spotify and the rest of the community to make this a great event for all of you guys. Thank you Awesome, and the third gentleman that you see on the slide is is Bowie the mascot of the project Bowie the beaver and He's in just a beaver I feel like he embodies a lot of values and and really the spirit of this community the community of curious Builders coming together to build something greater than the cell of its parts and to really just Contribute to the best developer experience in the world So what brings us together today? Why backstage like what is it that retailers? streaming Services airlines banks governments startups and enterprise companies all have in common. It's developers, right? and Developers dealing with complexities like more complexities than ever before and a lot of frustrations, too that aren't just writing code really and Backstage attempts to solve all of that by providing an aggregated Layer on top of all of your infrastructure and tooling streamlining your workflows Unblocking the obstacles that you might encounter on the way and providing you the more fulfilling Work experience as well. Would you agree Balaji? Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I think the increasing dollar productivity is a key objective for backstage And if you look at these the persona that platform engineer persona, which is another persona I see a lot where they're responsible for helping you remove those Barriers for the Dollopers and have cell service for developers. They're essentially bringing the best practices and being able to program that through the backstage Software templates, for example, one of the things that for example security, you know shift Love you all talk about shift left as something that we should do but it's hard to implement But if you think about it, you could use the backstage Software catalog you can actually shift down the platform engineers can help them ship down the complexity for the developers And he helped them get adopted, right? That's really good thing And I think this is where we are like backstage brings all of us together It back stage brings is a platform that brings all of us together speaking up together I think you know the whole community is helping contribute to this platform. So thank you very much and Specifically for this day. I think I want to make sure that I We we we say thanks to the sponsors. We have multiple sponsors. Obviously the diamond sponsors and also the One and then platinum sparser than the gold sponsors. We also want to thank the cncf organizing committee The Linux foundation team to help put the team together and also the programming committee There's a lot of effort put into it from a time and effort and money I guess in terms of bringing this event together So I hope that you guys have a great day. So Helen, I'll let you take the next next level Totally So what's what's up? What's up backstage? What's buzzing? What's new since we last met? Let's do a quick recap. Shall we what's happened? Wouldn't you agree? I? Mean for starters backstage celebrated its fourth birthday Happy birthday backstage So what happened on the 16th of March four years ago is a tiny little team at Spotify Pushing backstage project into open source and this team since then has grown to a large global Community with more than 13,000 members Contributing to it like making the noise making the bus supporting each other and discord 24-7 so we've we've come a long way and Yeah, as like the adoption is growing as the community is growing It's really really great to see like the distribution like of Yeah, I guess of this community geographically like can you guess how many countries do we have now part of the community? Any wild guesses just shout don't be shy 92 all right any any anymore for any more Gentlemen in the back Come on, you know the stuff so 52 52 Countries are now part of the of the community. We now effectively have all the continents covered so Antarctica TBD, I guess but Effectively like all the continents have contributors and and adopters part of this community Like how is the overall ecosystem doing you would ask? And Like the backstage has been on the exponential growth ever since the beginning on multiple different dimensions And as you can see like with the community growth It's not only that but also like the product is mature in itself. The product is growing itself So we now have more than 150 plugins in the ecosystem and we have like 1500 Serial contributors contributing features requests Backbashing just making it better really for for one another and in terms of The new releases this year as we speak fresh of the process 124 it's going out the doors I'm not gonna touch on like some of those feature releases in depth because There will be talk that covers it if you want like in-depth overview of 24 2024 roadmap go check maintainers talk tomorrow at 10 past noon with Patrick Bannon, I guess maybe Freben but couple of highlights on the things that we We really think are important improvements So one of the biggest milestones that gets shipped with one 24 release is security By default and what it means is that you don't have to Now protect your or like own you're not obliged to protect your own backstage instance from unauthorized access It's done for you as well as a couple of other small improvements to user Talk ins and to the way we handle user accounts There are a couple of spaces to watch out as well They're under active development and like you will see a lot of activity around in the coming Year and I know blood you've been close to some of them. So over to you now Yeah, sounds good. So the couple of things was dynamic plugins. They're able you to install Plugins runtime so that you don't have to rebuild backstage. That's one that's pretty exciting update The other ones that are notification plugins We have a new notification back end system that allows you to notify the users in the backstage UI That's what's that's what's working right now and then in the future We can also send notification offline like you're not looking at the backstage screen You can still get notifications from the plugins through through the through the email for example And so these are all possible. What's what's what's ahead? I mean, there's a lot ahead a lot of them depends on you I think that community can coming together and Driving the direction of the of the road map I mean, I was part of red hat I joined about a year ago to this community and I can tell you the Spotify and the rest of the community has been very Welcoming in in helping us contribute and new features and apart roadmaps And I think she took the next slide Yeah, I do want to talk about one thing you have the clicker. Sorry. I don't want to talk about one thing Which is a community plug-in? Yeah, sorry, okay Which is The one thing I really quickly touch upon is the centralized Community plug-in initiative you started right today if you look at it everybody all the plug-in contributors or publishers are maintaining the plugins in different places and It's very different. They're actually going to their own process of publishing the plugins for a community It's very difficult to find where these plugins are contribute to it, etc So we we are coming together to create a community plug-in repository It's still optional. You know, if you want to use it, it's great So what is the benefit of it? Obviously everybody is able to find the plugins in one place and they can follow the standardized for publishing process and The plug-in contributors are still able to maintain control or continue to maintain the plug-in So you don't want to you'd have to wait for somebody else to prove it's your own workspace so you can still get updated I think hopefully you get more contributions pull requests from the overall community to help you get started And I want you to get involved with the community obviously special interest groups are the way to get involved in the community Special interest groups essentially is a bunch of people who are interested in specific topic coming together and you know working on it These are the four six available that adoption primarily focusing on you know all the way from discovery to POC to Evaluation and installation catalog and scaffold or skater essentially the places where you get the front and the back end plug-in The API's for those projects and obviously the community Sig we just talked about join the community join the discard channels and we also have a little survey that you if you don't mind Filling it out. We have a bet going on in terms of how many surveys will be filled out. So this allows you to Give us feedback. You know give the community feedback. We'll share it back with the community And how are you experiencing backstage? What are the problem areas? You know who's adopting who's not adopting? What are the challenges? It's really important for us to the community to get feedback about the health of the project So please do fill it out. Just take a snapshot of it Here's a code of contact standard code of contact take a look at it You know if you're familiar with it, obviously just treat everybody with kindness and respect Yeah, I didn't mean to kick you but I guess we need to breeze through the rest. We are yeah on a clock So yeah, there will be refreshments and meals some table topics for Networking but with that without further ado, let's go. Let's go. Let's go backstage. Let's do it and Yeah, I'm really pleased and honored to welcome our first set of speakers on stage Here we go