 So welcome to our talk of shaping the future of developer experience let's go do some introductions and so I'm Ben I'm a maintainer on backstage I have been working in Spotify for about four years now working on backstage since it's been open source really so Francesco? Francesco from Italy you see the and yeah Spotify employee but fully dedicated on backstage project manager cool all right so let's get started so what the heck on what is backstage anyway one earth is backstage so backstage is an open platform for building developer for building developer platform so portals even sorry let me stop so what do we mean by this but it's open source so that means it's free it's a platform which is like a framework or collection of libraries and it's there to be built your own developer portal in your organization or company so just a quick show of hands before we get started who's heard of backstage before we're in the right room that's good okay anyone using in production amazing wow all right so developing in today's world can be complex and challenging because there's just so much going on now that you couldn't do 10 years ago there's new languages new technologies new open source and SaaS solutions and every company is different right and every company uses different technologies so this kind of leads to fragmentation and it's this fragmentation that's slowing engineers down so having to navigate through different tools different things that your organizers organization might have and knowing how to get the information that you as a developer needs to know and this is what backstage is all about so being able to build a platform to boost product develop a productivity in your organization so developer platforms like backstage are going to help you increase the speed engineers work out by providing the tools to work autonomously and get the information that they need to get a click of a button it's a single pane of glass that can help you roll out standards throughout your organization which helps to remove some of those fragmented barriers and by centralizing these services and standardizing the tooling backstage can streamline your development environment from end to end which will come up in just a second and finally in order for a development platform to be successful it needs to have a good ecosystem so backstage is core is very simple but allows customization through plugins and it's these plugins that you can build inside your own organization to show your own data and build these workflows and tools to suit your company it's this living thing this is not something that should just be like one fire and forget solution backstage is going to evolve over time and bringing new information to developers so in Spotify we have a team of probably like six seven people which actually like ship backstage so they're the people that's in charge of backstage then we delegate building in a source plugins to teams inside Spotify to surface this information they're in charge of if you know what I mean so that we have like a build team and they're in charge of surface in a build view because they know what information developers want to see so we leave them to do that so I've got a little bit of stats here let me just find it so it's we have nearly 200 plugins inside Spotify that are built by around 100 teams maybe and they power thousands of developers in the organization so backstage is open source and with that comes a lot of great contribution so the community is huge and thriving in backstage so from its launch in March 2020 we've had nearly a hundred plugins being contributed to the project contributed to the project that allow you to get integrated with your third party service and tools without having the hassle of building these integrations yourself so things like Jenkins, GitHub, Page, Duty though this goes on this can all be integrated in back in your backstage organization and so reduce the developer headache you or your organizations don't need to create these in the source plugins to get started and start getting the benefit of backstage you can just use this marketplace so you can also use the plugins that ship out of the box with backstage and it's some of those that I'd like to show you today so I'm going to give you a little heads up I tried this demo earlier and it didn't work but we're going to go with it anyway and let's just pray the demographic works so let's talk about the centralization of technology assets so as your company and your organization or business grows so does the amount of services and components that run inside your organization so like you might have to start off with a monolith and then this might become microservices and then suddenly you've got a lot of stuff to manage inside your organization so this is where the software catalog comes in so the software catalog is responsible for indexing your entire organization's technology assets so we wanted to provide a way to index all these for you keep all the metadata that lives with these components alongside the code and to keep this up to date so that every team can manage the services services they own and the related resources like deployments data pipeline full requests whatever so backstage makes it easy for one team to manage 10 services and it also makes it possible for your entire company to manage thousands of them so let's just give you a quick demo of the software catalog uh I'm going to try this let's do the work oh my god don't look at my desktop pain uh where the hell is it done there we go let's go with this one all right let's create a new tab on here thank you Gervaux and then I'm to oh sure the full screen all right so we've got our little demo here so I'm gonna before I carry on so we have a booth in the project for brilliant and we're running a little bit more on advanced demo than this so please come by and see us and we can take it through in a little bit more detail so I'm just going to go to the catalog first um yes it's working okay that's good so this is basically the view that you would get for the catalog so we can see here these are some of my own services or components inside this demo organization which is called rocket um we can see here these are the four things I own we can see everything in the company lots of things here all things are star for instance I can click into one of these things that I own and get a little bit more information about it so this is called the entity page so this is super customizable you can put in your own plugins in here and show the information that you need around this component on this service so we can see we've got some CICD stuff here this is just gonna hook up to get your factions for instance for this demo and show the stuff that's running um and then we've got more tabs across the top here full request and let's go and head back to this so software creation so standards in any organization are the key to scale so we as Spotify want to make it easy for engineers to get set up and get basically reduce the barrier to building new components inside your organization so if we you know we say we want to ship Java or Java applications Java services we want to be able to make it super easy for you to bootstrap that Java program Java backend service or whatever with login monitoring metrics all that stuff baked into one place so this is why we made software templates so software templates allow you to create these bare boilerplate kind of repositories or anything really and get it set up really quickly so that an engineer just fills out a little form and then we go off and create all this in the back let me quickly demo this so this is the thing that didn't work so let's give this a go so i'm going to go to create here and i'm just going to pick one of these templates so these are the templates uh that you that you might have in your organization they can be super extensible so you can create custom UI form fields to collect more data from the engineer or you can create custom actions in the backend which is going to allow you to integrate with any of your services or any of your like wherever providers that you might have to do custom things custom actions so let's click on one of these create this so i'm just gonna fill out a random name here uh random and description is going to be hello cute hello cute girl and then we pick an owner and we click on next and then this is going to be this i think and then we just pick a random repository so this is basically just filling out where we want to where we want to save the repository where we want to create the component and the demo is going to be let's do cube come demo one two three because that's probably never taken and we click on create so this is going to go ahead and run our template so it starts off by pulling down some skeleton files doing some templating in there putting in the values that the engineers typed out then we go and create the repository in github and it looks like it's working and it did yes um so this is going to go and push all that templated code to github for you i can go and click on like the repository here and it's going to show you the repo if the internet is friendly and it's not i've not signed in anyway there's a repo there um and then it's going to register it in the proofs this book about stopper catalog for us so if i now go back to the catalog which i've just mentioned do i have the thing that i just created yeah random here it is click on this and here we are the random component i've just created and is there a build i could be interesting you know okay uh but yeah this is basically going to create us everything that we need to do in our organization super flexible super easy to get started and the last bit so onboarding so onboarding is hard well especially when you're a growing company and it's also something that you really need to make right and make engineers get enough to speed really quickly so we found in in Spotify that is there was a lot of effort being there's a lot of effort from engineers to get open running inside a company and documentation is p for this so we made the tech dogs plugin or dogs like code which is trying to help with it so we basically want to store documentation alongside components and alongside the repository and code of that service so it's written in markdown and we've written a plugin that will convert all this markdown into beautiful html that you can see inside backstage so we use this for quite a lot of things not just documenting components and services themselves but also like creating things that we call golden paths which is basically kind of like a getting started with web development or back in development inside Spotify so it's all of our standards and how we do things like logging and things like that all baked into documentation so i'd like to just quickly show you the documentation we've got so i'm just going to go back to this demo here so if i go to one of our components let's go to like the music app and then i click on documentation that doesn't have documentation that was a bad choice launch app there we go and click on docs so we're going to see all the documentation for the launch app that is deployed or inside the repository of where this is stored so this is just some demo documentation that you can see here but yeah we got a nice some documentation um we're going back to like the golden path stuff that i was talking about and how we do this at Spotify so this is kind of an example here we click on our documentation here and we see more of a rich guide and rich kind of documentation for engineers to get started so we have steps for instance here nice little panels on the side so with this also you can also extend this too so you'll see that we can add widgets and customizations to this to extend the extend the behavior of the teta plugin and also if i just like you know click on this edit button here i can see this it's going to take me to the github repo where i can actually this is not working anyway imagine there's a read-me document there that i can also see too um yeah and that's kind of the demo that i've got so far i'm going to hand over to Francesco now and he's going to carry on thank you ben so okay so this is uh we did an exercise recently it's a new thing about estimating how many developers are impacting with all of this so i mean i don't know if you're aware but backstage is having a great moment where we are super happy super energetic we will see more data after we estimated how many developers are using backstage or i mean of course it's an estimation how many developers we are impacting and the number is huge is huge we are super happy super excited about that so the next question that i would like to discuss with you talking about more than 440 companies some of them are here and very proud of this but we are aware about we are aware because it's an open source and free project we can download for free by github from github we are aware the early this morning they were 446 that we are aware of with more than 240 in the pipeline considering to adopt and during a weekly office hour that we prepare and we offer to the one interested to know more about backstage we had in the past few five months more than 200 companies joining it's amazing it's incredible the moment that we are that you are experiencing so what i would like to discuss with you is beyond what ben was showing so beyond what backstage is doing is already providing its benefit to the company what this more than 446 companies are doing with backstage it is incredible i i i often talk with many of you and many of the adopters incredible how things how this new things are happening beyond what we were expecting beyond what we were thinking what i would like to discuss with you is what is the evolution of the developer experience through backstage but not done by us in isolation but done by the community the community of more than 446 companies adopting let's be inspired by them and just a disclaimer because we have adopters in the room if you don't see your name quoted here i apologize but it doesn't mean that you don't need to be it seems that i didn't have time to collect all the all the things let's go through all of them first of all i would like to share something about the representative ben was showing and most in particular about the software capital so the central repository you have all the technology asset the software entity that your company is using this is sd a c it's an important consultancy company and what they tell and what they see is that the capital can address also the problem of the sparse organization composed by many companies and the company's x doesn't don't know what the company's z is doing and they don't know about the software the entities they are managing it's amazing also lisius case another important topic is the technical documentation ben highlighted this very well we worked with i mean one of the idea behind the technical documentation is to treat the documentation as code this is what makes the developer closer to the technical documentation this is what reduced the friction what helped the developers to have better documentation and we were we are working with stack over four to provide a closer experience of from the technical documentation to the problem and the issue that the developers are are doing it's a huge help it's something that we didn't imagine at the time uh this is tell us probably tell us is also in the room uh great job guys uh they did an amazing experience because i mean we want to help the developers in having better documentation but they also integrated with third party services to help also the non-technical people to write good documentation through backstage it's amazing it's something that we didn't imagine uh they integrated the content food that is our api driven uh cms uh to work with backstage if you want to know more they know the guy they are the guys about creating software components it's amazing what happened this is american airlines what they are doing uh they are offering the opportunity to create python services api's but not only this also applications business entities with one click in the way that band was showing it's fantastic this is box box uh uh added something that is more human centric so of course creating a software component can be something that you can completely optimize uh make it automatically through the tool that we were showing and that backstage is implementing an offering but there's also some human interaction maybe not approval maybe in certain conditions you have to do something in some area of the company they integrated a complete workflow with this folder how easy is this to create software in a self-service way with a human centric approach instead of a technological complexity that remains valid but of course we want to make it easier reuse of components these are massive uh things that is happening in the market this is american airlines again where they created a plugin so service is part of backstage where all the developers before starting to implement an api a software entity they can go to this marketplace to understand if something already exists in the company it's fantastic you avoid the problem from the beginning similar solution from deutschbank uh they use this taxonomy added to the software entities and so they have again this sort of marketplace where you search for i don't know something related to the customer satisfaction and you have api software entity and maybe you as a developer can use something that is already existing in your organization instead of reinventing the wheel all the time jobs to be done guys we are a developer and uh the morning when we switch on our computer the first thing is okay i need to see what i have to do this is a lando they call our their instance of backstage sunrise and they have a home page where there is the full list of full requests or things that they have to do during the day backstage is helping them in their job not only because it is making easier but also because it's helping them in the task to do this is sound cloud it's a competitor of spotify but we don't care we help them and we want to work with them with the same solution and they did an amazing contribution to backstage because they implemented the announcement box so every developer every day the first time that they they turn on the backstage they have a notification to say hey guys be aware that since the last time you were here happened this this this and this we are helping the developers to do back to their job uh then it's uh this is this is one of my favorite one i mean we want to help the developer be better and we want to help the developer improve the quality of the things that that they are doing uh this is again sdaca but have many examples Splunk already also something to quote uh they create this communication approach where every developer can receive this label if in case of improving the quality and for me this is really a game changer because it's not only about helping the developer but it's taking literally the developer experience to the next level the tool is helping the developers and the organization to have better quality software we highlight through the system we can highlight through the system how to be better how to produce better software that is absolutely fantastic uh these are a list of other clusters of ideas that i have seen in our hundreds of adopters every adopters is rebranding backstage can you please raise your hand the adopters are not rebranding backstage one two three four okay cool a couple of there so uh measuring engineering productivity i'm pretty sure most of you is interested especially on the management side is interested on this topic if you have a single portal when everything happened how easy it is it is i'm not saying it's easy it's easier because now it's pretty complex we are in a world where everything wants to become a what to be a platform the platformization topic is a huge topic instead of thinking about siloed software we want to think about platforms communicating one each other this is exactly that backstage can help with with the single repository and the chart the relation charts uh thinking about business process beyond what is our software component something that is a more abstractions of abstraction on top of the software entities and another interesting use case i very frequently receive question about if the internal developer portal is what you have seen here it's something that we can apply also for customers partners external ecosystem of developers imagine that you are a company probably you are a company that is offering services outside can we offer backstage outside of the organization instead of inside it is an option of course provides transparency and probably more and probably more uh let me quote i don't know if there are the vmware folks here in the room hello so we are doing an amazing job as part of the community because beyond what we were expecting backstage is used also in stocks and solutions backstage is a platform sitting on top of the existing services not implementing any of the service but making easier the consumption of the services what we are experiencing that major company vmware is one of them but what we have many other collaborations and collaborations are becoming a thing right now are interested to put backstage on top of the solution simply because it makes easier the usage of the technology and it's very nice so let me run popular because i took only a few of them you can stay here for hours and i would love to do this so we created backstage to make the developers happy and i mean if you remember the 1.2 millions of developers that we are potentially impacted we are super proud and super excited about that because it is continuing to grow a lot i don't know if you're aware about the the project is on github but we have more than so early this morning it was eighteen thousand and nine hundred stars we are getting to the nine nineteen hundred nineteen thousand stars we are the fourth project as part of the cncf cncf ecosystem which is of a contributor more than eight hundred it's a very open project more than seven thousand and five hundred members in discord free open join us hundreds of people at every hour of the day and and the night and we are super happy about that honestly what we are experiencing something that is going beyond making the developer happy that it is happening and we are very we want to continue on that path is about hearing and work with the adopters to shape the future of the developer experience and this is this is something that we are going all together not only us as Spotify but all together in an open source in an open manner because as you know open source is the right way to approach all of this and to grow together backstage it's amazing because it's already allowing hundreds of big organizations structure organizations to do all of this and honestly we are experiencing that the future of the developer experience is happening now all together that it's amazing join us we will be happy to have you thank you very much