 Good morning, everyone. It's so amazing to be at an event in person. I'm just excited feeling thrilled So yeah, I'm not David. My name is Valentina Larry. I'm a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm responsible for a whole lot of products. They were building that are Really supporting application teams on their journey of starting to use cloud native technologies Kubernetes underneath but really everything that it's part of that Landscape and I do care a whole lot about the experience of these teams So I care a whole lot about the developer experience But I also care a whole lot about their counterparts that succops as they partner with developers to enable them on their journey I spent a whole lot of time with users with customers And so what I wanted to do today was to share back with this amazing community Some key takeaways what I hear from them what their needs are and what we can do as a community to make them more successful So first and foremost you heard a whole lot already this morning about developer experience And I just want a level set. Why do we care so much about developer experience? fundamentally the TLDR there is that Businesses depend on developer experience businesses depend on developer productivity There's a great framework with this developer velocity index But pick your favorite poison in terms of how you want to measure developer productivity Organizations that have higher developer productivity are fundamentally more successful They're able to react to changing business needs faster They make their workforce more productive And they're just able to support bigger and greater innovation and so Really everything that we're doing at VMware with his products and many of you in this community is to Make sure we boost up this this developer productivity and we enable these organizations to roll out applications faster Now what it's critical here to keep in mind is that this is very much top of mind for organizations globally for enterprise Probably I've been finding myself more and more lately meetings where I start talking about developer productivity And the customers toss me in my track and they pull up their slides and it very much looks like my slide And it's all about how developer productivity. It's important for them They have Kiki PIs or OKRs or however They want to measure their objectives and performances and it's really all about establishing a strategy around developer productivity And you know every organization out there. It's in the business of writing software So this is not about niche enterprises. It's really about everyone globally caring deeply about all of this Now, where are we? How are we rating ourselves in terms of developer productivity? We're not quite there globally. If you look at enterprises You know a lot of developers out there are experiencing friction And David was talking a little bit about this earlier, right? A lot of this comes from just the richness of the ecosystem that CNCF is Which suddenly translates into just complexity in navigating that choice There's just too many tools out there that are available to teams And they're just having a hard time figuring out where to start from What to use how to use it in a collaborative way with others within the organization and this is across every vertical and You know, we see this Having of course its unique challenges and characteristics in more regulated verticals like financial or federal environments But very much something that applies as a global phenomena So we we clearly have a huge opportunity as a community to go and solve a Problem that it's core to how businesses operate And so this is where concepts like the golden paths come into the picture If any of you has not read the blogs that a Spotify team published around the golden paths Go add them to your reading list. They're fantastic And very much Something that we believe is core to how we're going to be solving this problem moving forward We've been talking about this as curated path to production But very much the concept is the same there the idea is that you want to extract Signal from the noise we want to extract order from chaos of organizations having a gazillion choices You know, I was spending time with the large financial customers a few weeks back and they were telling me that they have Tens of thousands of custom code that supports each individual path of production that every single line of business Organizations needs to have and this is just unsustainable And so the whole notion here of creating this curated less yet customizable path of productions enables you to then offer Order and best practices and predefined patterns your developers which fundamentally then boost their productivity Now we think, you know, that is just you know, it's one aspect of what we need to do there With that has to come really a curation of of the tools a curation of the experience Developers are as you all know creature of habits, right? And so we want to make sure these tools are available where they are used to be working Which is very much their IDE environment for example So really bringing the tools to them versus asking them to go find the tools somewhere else And as if you think if you think about enterprise Enterprise customers This has to be that augmented with additional capabilities and one of the key themes if you think about enterprises Looking at developer productivity and complimenting in it. It's all about security and best practices All right, so it's all about being able to enforce security in a way that it's end-to-end and it's embedded We all talk about shifting left Shifting left should should not ever mean that this becomes a burden for the developer It means that the organization is able to enforce Security best practices in a way that it's completely transparent to the developer the developer should just not be thinking about it There's automatic scanning ability to detect vulnerabilities react to that and everything that is just just happens under the hoods for for the developer It means that You can support line of businesses With their unique needs without again having the developer go crazy figuring out how to develop one way in production One way for that one way for staging and so on and so forth And it also really means that you're thinking about how different roles and Personas are going to work together Each of them plays a fundamental role and you want to make sure that there is clear separation of concerns of what the developer should Care about and for example for the security problems. I was describing earlier The sec operator is responsible for and yet. How can they collaborate? To achieve those business outcomes to roll software to production faster So as as we set up on our journey as VMware to build a product that solved a lot of those challenges We find ourselves at a fork in the road and this was a couple of years back it was the very early days of project backstage and As we started building our platform offering, which we call tons application platform We also wanted to make sure there was a fantastic developer portal which would you know really address the needs of the developers and their counterparts at DevSecOps for Suna And as I said, we found ourselves at a fork in the road on one end. There was project backstage And on the other end it was just going and building it ourselves and in the early days There were a few rough address In backstage project and so we went down the path of building it ourselves And this is really not very dissimilar from what a lot of the customers that I work with on a daily basis They started building things. There's a wide collection of portals out there But as we went down that path at some point as we kept revisiting and evaluating backstage We decided it was way better for us and for the customers that we serve to actually join This community actively and started taking advantage of of really backstage and then contribute back and enrich it And so we sort of switch path over and started building on top of project backstage and has been Just a really fantastic experience and we've been able to really bring this better together to to our customers We've been of course really packaging and hardening what backstage is for enterprise customers So they have a lot of unique needs as you can imagine from scaling to just hardening security They want to have really this curation So we we help repackage a bunch of plugins to make a whole lot of sense for them We augment that with things that are very much specific to what we're doing around that path of production and that security So you heard just some examples of our security analysts Goes and a bunch of other things they were we've recently been building over on top of backstage But the reason why I wanted to share this is because our journey is very much reflective of the customer's journey We're working with What is extremely exciting about backstage is the possibility that this puts in front of us as we look at Bringing together existing portals as we look at bringing together existing technologies and really building a hub for organizations for collaboration There's there's an incredible opportunity to really create this one common view You know, there's so much that already exists within an enterprise Especially as the larger it is the more True this is but what it's very hard is finding whatever it's already there Whether it's API whether it's projects Whether it's documents whether it's anything else you may be adding on top of that and so creating this one learning spot Brings a whole lot of value to these large organizations And so just just you know really wanted to celebrate how far along we've come as a community and just two years being able to really bring this to organizations with The peace of mind that this will satisfy the most stringent regulated environment the largest scale the most unique use cases because let's not forget that what makes this backstage project so powerful is The whole idea of these plugins right how much each organization can then customize and add What it's uniquely Important for them to the instance that you bring to them And so just want to thank you all for the hard work that you're all are doing has been exciting to be part of this journey And I just love to see how much user is just just adore this project and How excited they are to be able to start using it within their organizations? Looking forward to chat with you all in the hallway track and enjoy your wick