 All right. Hello, everybody. I am here today to talk about talking in backstage, which it feels a bit of an inception thing. But the reason why I want to talk about this is because a few months ago, I was talking with a backstage contributor and he asked me, why is a developer portal? And I was like, oh, well, backstage does create, supposed to make, is a framework for making developer portals. So that got me thinking of how there is maybe a disconnection of how we talk about backstage in different scenarios or different people because people have different interests. And, well, I introduce myself. I am Jorge Cana Fiesta. And before, I used to have no problem with people running away from me. But nowadays, when they see that I have the marketing name in my title, the developers just want to leave the room. But no, I am not going to sell you anything. I just want to talk about talking in backstage because words are important and they carry a lot of meaning. And I got confronted with this because recently I was commissioned to write the introduction to backstage course by the Linux Foundation. So that got me confronted with having to explain backstage to an audience who has not been exposed to anything that we are so used to. And the reason why it might be tricky to talk about backstage is because adopting backstage is an organical passing initiative. To do it right, you have to go all the way in to get the most value out of it. And it is very significant because we are going to put people who have never met working together, sharing the knowledge, sharing software with other people in the organization. It is going to create a lot of possibilities, but also it is going to make us find out that there are things that we didn't know were working as expected. And everybody has their own objectives. Just because we have backstage doesn't mean that everybody is aligned all of a sudden. They will keep having their own context, their own priorities. And that's why the way I want to frame these concepts that I'm going to do is to provide a little glossary. And to do that, I want to take into account three personas. First are the words, which is most of the people in this room. We touch backstage with our hands. We get dirty trying to set it up. And then for it to be easy, a success, we need sponsors, people who are ready to support backstage at a larger scale and push it at the organizational level. And then it's the most important part of backstage adoption, which are the users. Without developers using backstage, it would have no point to set up the scaffolder and the templates and all of this. So it's really important that we can come, we can get our point across of why they should use backstage. Because how we saw on the previous dark Q&A developers just don't trust it. It's like, oh, are you offering me this? I don't trust you. I have to see it with my own eyes. And that's something that we have to get them to go through. So I want to present a very brief backstage glossary because I only have very few minutes. I actually don't know what the time is. So I'm just going to go through it as I can. And this is also something embedded in the grand tradition of the CNCF. The CNCF has its own glossary for things cloud native. Because all of these are new terms. So it's hard to come to somebody and be like, hey, how's your entity going? It's like, I don't know. We have to have some, some more clear idea of what things are. So the following definitions are going to be more of a broader scope. Rather than technically, they want to communicate what it does. So several people that are not embedded in the backstage community can get an understanding of what we're talking about. So the first one is backstage. What is backstage? Backstage, the way you see it, it's a framework for building developer portals that promote discoverability and autonomy. And it's important for me for people to understand that backstage is a framework because I have witnessed a lot of people who get frustrated because they run the, create backstage CLI and that, oh, my whole company is not running on a unified developer platform. No, because you have to make it your own. So that's, I think, an important point to communicate when talking about backstage. Next word is developer portal. This is also a new concept that has emerged and it's still shaping the form. You can still see, you can already see several reports and news reports and people are starting to talk about this. And the way I phrase it is that it's a self-service one-stop shop for everybody who wants to contribute to our ecosystem. And this is something that is not new. Before we had developer portals, public developer portals for Apple, there was a developer portal where you could access tools for developing documentation. And this is something that we are doing now internally. So it's everybody who wants to communicate, do something for us. Any developer, whether it's an employee, a contractor, another company, they can do so through the developer portal. The next definition would be then is discoverability. That is how easy it is to find something. And this seems like a kind of trivial thing written down, but the reality is that it's very difficult. I have to talk with people who tell me that they take weeks or even, I don't know, it can take you a month to find out all the APIs, all the tools, all the libraries to find how do you build this new feature that you're asked to do? Because you have to go through Slack and there are these people living in Japan and your offices in Atlanta and you have to figure out how to get a hold of them to get, even to know if their login method that you're using is going to be compatible with another API that somebody else wrote. So if this is taking you too much time, then you have a problem of discoverability and Baxi can help you address this. The next word in the glossary is software catalog. Software catalog is an instructor collection of software assets. The idea is that it's not just a list of things because you can have hundreds of thousands of entities, as we'll see soon in one of the talks, that you can build, kind of model your ecosystem with backstage. And that is what makes it easier to navigate and go through what is very complex. It can be consumable by somebody who's new to the organization, for example, or a contributor that is used to working with his team or her team, but now has to contribute with somebody else. And they can see what are the affordances that they have available at the company. The next one is the entity. This is a horror movie. But it's not going to be a horror to work with entities. Entities are just the unit of information stored in the catalog. And I think these entities are very important because at the end there are going to be a foundation on the information that we can consume in backstage and depending on how we structure the entities, that's how we are going to see what's going to be resulting in the catalog. And you can just link so many things into the entities like documentation and all the integrations. So it's really a central piece of backstage. Next is search. And search is a way of discovering as well. It's because developers not only want to see, like, oh, here's the model of the ecosystem. Sometimes you just want to know something. And a natural way of doing it is searching it. But if you have to go through GitHub and your internal documentation and to go through all kind of cloud providers trying to find just how to use the API, then it becomes difficult to even get started. So I think this is one of the biggest features of boxes that you can have different sources and search across them. So you can actually discover more easily what you want without having to go through the overload of going through an entire organization. Because sometimes you don't even know what you are looking for. You just know a keyword and then you have to go through it. So I think this is a great thing that Backstage provides. Next is plugins. And in Backstage, your plugins are not their regular plugin where you just log something and you add functionality. In Backstage, plugins are your features. And I think it's useful to say that plugins are features because then when somebody is another team wants a feature in Backstage because they want something for their analytics. Instead of opening a feature request to your team that is the Backstage maintainer or the Instant maintainer, then you just say, oh, to add a feature, you create a plugin and then you can contribute that to your internal developer platform. And this is helpful for people to understand that they also own the developer portal and they can contribute back to it, which is a model that Backstage promotes. Then is self-service, which is just getting the resources that you need without having to ask anybody to give it to you without opening tickets or being in the amount of slack to tell you how to use an API or setting up a meeting with 20 people to find out how to authenticate to a certain service. So the idea in Backstage is that you can just get it yourself. Next is open source, which is not free. You still need to invest to make it work, to make it your own and contribute back because that's the only way to actually get the most out of Backstage because if you develop everything on private and never share upstream, then the problem is going to be for you because then you're going to be straining away from the open source part and then it's going to be more intensive for you to keep up and you end up outside being caught off the community because you didn't contribute back. So it's actually an investment to work in open source. And then the final word is community, which is power, because this is what has led us here. After Spotify shared on the CNCF, it was very generous and they donated to the CNCF Backstage project, it became truly successful, it's a public good and then we can all contribute and make it grow so fast as it has over the past few years. If you notice, this is the biggest conference on the co-located events and Backstage is not even like a very old project. It's very new, but we have hundreds of adopters and people are always pushing it to do more things. So it's great that you all are here today and thank you for your attention.