 and welcome back to the Windy City. We are here in Chicago on day one of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, CNCF's largest event here in North America, and I am thrilled to be joined today both by some fantastic guests from Red Hat, but also with my co-host, Rob. How are you doing? Pretty good. How are you doing? Good. I feel like this next conversation we're about to have is maybe one of your favorite conversations and one of the ones you're most excited about at the show. It happens to be one of my favorite projects that's going on here under the CNCF, so I'm very excited about this because I think the energy around this project in particular is just really great and I think getting into the fact that BackstageCon was yesterday and really the just amount of people, I think there's 2,000 different developers now active in that community. Wow, it's awesome. So very, very excited about this next. Yeah, well I guess we should probably let the audience run in on the conversation. Please welcome our fabulous guest, Balaji and Ignacio, so nice to meet you. Thank you for being here with us today. Thank you so much for inviting. Since not all of us had the chance to be at BackstageCon, what happened yesterday, Balaji? Yeah, it was great that a number of people in the audience, one of the biggest from I guess one of those co-located events, I don't know the room was like, rooms with like 1,000 people or something, right? I mean, it's probably like 700, 800 people there which is really great. Coming from last year, it was almost double, you know, from last year, it's really great. Wow. Yeah, it's really cool. Snaps to that. Yeah, and then we had a great number of end users talking about it, Expedia, Comcast, you know, different people talking about how they're using Backstage, so it's a lot of good energy there. And you were doing a keynote there as well, right? Absolutely. And was that part of the keynote, or what did you have to say in the keynote? Yeah, so my keynote was about, I wanted to share how Red Hat is contributing to the growth of Backstage. You know, I was actually preparing for it. I didn't realize Red Hat contributed to one million projects in the open source projects. Wow. One million? Just want to make sure the audience used that. Yeah, it's one million. One million open source projects. That's a milestone. Red Hat is like, lives and breath open source ethos. So this is like another project we are going to, we are supporting, obviously at Cubicon, we are a big contributor to Kubernetes and, you know, Linux and everything else. So Backstage is what you were talking about. So I talked about like, what are we contributing to help adoption of Backstage and enterprises? That's what we are a core competency is, and that's how I talked about it. Did you get a feeling that there was a lot of new developers or new users in the room that were really, if we look back to in Amsterdam, KUKON and CloudNativeCon, it was about 50% new users, new to Kubernetes. What's the feeling you've gotten? I'm not asking for exact numbers, obviously. Yeah, I mean, I definitely say 50% is probably like, you know, sort of the earlier part of adoption of looking into going, you know, using Backstage for their developer productivity, you know, gaining, yeah, yeah, that's good. That's exciting. So Balaji, you mentioned that there were double the people in the room that were there last year. Ignacio, why do you think that's happening? Well, cause of all this wonderful growth. Well, think about it. I mean, you need to put two things together. One is the developer productivity. That is a hot topic. Right now, we have one number that is 76% of developers struggle with the cognitive load. That is, there are 76% of developers struggle with cognitive load. With cognitive load, my gosh, aren't we all talking a little bit about the load? Yeah, basically, if you think about it, when you join a company, and we were talking, Spotify was talking about this, one of the critical challenges that they have is a developer joins their company and they don't know how to be productive. There are so much documentation, so many templates, so many things that they need to learn about what are the right tools, the right people to connect. So that was their challenge about 2016. Then they start working on how we are going to improve this situation for our developers to make our developers more productive. And that's why they start with backstage. Then three years later, they say, this is a good idea, not only for us, but it's a great idea also for other developers in other companies. So they start thinking, why we don't put this in a public project? And then, from there, 2022, that was accepted, and now we are where we are. But if you think about it, the challenge is the same for all the companies. That is, there are too many tools, too much documentation in order to get productive, so that's why- Too much noise. And things are getting more and more complicated. So things are not getting easier. Things are getting more complicated. So how do you solve that challenge? And think about another element that is, you have the developers, but also you have the people creating the platform for those developers. So the people developing those platforms are the critical people, we call it the developers-developer, that is- Not out of you to say. Yeah, because who are those people that are going to make it easier of the life of the developers in order to become that productivity? The platform engineers, basically. They build a platform. Yeah. The developers-developer. I love it. And so critical. So why? I mean, I feel like productivity has always been a conversation, but the developer productivity conversation is super hot right now. Is that because of the complexity of the tools? Why now? Well, I think that developer productivity has always been a topic. I remember when some years ago they were telling me about the 10X developer. So those developers that were super unique, they were super productive, nobody knows exactly what they were doing. Those hotshots, yeah. Yeah, and if you think about it, those were unicorns in that sense. And the idea is, okay, how do we expand that? Because if we miss that developer, if that developer changes the company, a lot of knowledge just get out. Have we ensured that that knowledge remains in the company? Have we ensured that we don't have 10X developers, but we create a platform that allows our developers to become 10X? That's the big change, the big shift in the company. And just for those folks who might not be as aware of Backstage, it's really how do you bring together all of the tool chains that a developer is using in a portal and kind of put guardrails around it for that company, right? Yeah, maybe you can explain a bit what is Backstage, its tools, its documentation, its templates. Another element that the companies are really looking into is how we create those templates that are going to be applicable. Think about compliance is also another critical element. Because every- Not sexy, but critical. Yeah, but it's critical. Yeah, absolutely. If you think about it. Developers cannot start from scratch and do whatever they want. They need to ensure that any source that they use is secure, they are using the right sources. So, that is the role of the developers-developer. That is how we ensure that developers are compliance and we ensure that they use the secure tools. In order to create their applications, all the background that is needed is already there. Go for it. I was going to say, the Backstage as you know, it's still early. If you look at the Backstage con yesterday, I mean, you know that there are a lot more people interested, the problem is a big problem to solve. To his point, everybody has this problem. Now, the solving it is how do you solve it as a holy grail? And Backstage definitely is the right project to leading it, but they're still in the early phases. So, just to give you an idea of what Red Hat is contributing to Backstage to even get to the production. Our back, which is sort of like the normal thing, does not exist out of the box in Backstage. So, everybody can access everything, which is not that the enterprise would take it. And if you have to create an R-Back, it requires coding to create an R-Back plugin and then maintain it for enterprise. That's not scalable. So, what we did on yesterday was we had open sourcing an R-Back plugin, which basically allows you to have a way to define roles and sign groups and policies all through UI or configuration files. That's the one big thing to help adoption. Other thing we talk about. Is that doing it through Federation as well so that I can use a third-party provider and that may have where I design the rules and stuff like that or? Yeah, so basically, you know, we connect to all the traditional auth providers, right, to be able to get the groups and everything else. And then the rules are basically, you know, today you are essentially able to create it in-house, but also you can definitely pull in from the extra sources. The other big thing that we think is sort of like you're contributing that helps sort of adoption was around, you know, the ability to add new plugins. If you know the plugins is how you connect to the different tools that you're talking about. So adding a plugin that requires code change, rebuild and redeploy today. And that's another, like, no, no, for a large enterprise. Hey, I have a new developer coming in. I want to use a new tool. One of those tools from the QBCon here. Well, wait, wait, we got to do some code changes to make it happen. No, that's not going to work. So what we are contributing is another thing that's called dynamic plugins that allows you to do one-click adding of new plugins. So that's another big thing. And the last point I want to make on this thing is that we added about 10 to 12 plugins last six months, which is again expanding the ecosystem of plugins. Without the plugin, the backseat is just a shell. Right, at the end of the day, developers want to integrate with their tools to be productive. If you got to integrate the tool, it's, well, I'm not going to use the tool at all. So we added about 10 to 12 plugins. We want to do more. We're also working with the ISV ecosystem here to let them create more plugins for backstage. And hopefully with all of that, it's a multi-year journey if you may, right? We are here, great success, but we have a lot more to do. And that's what we're doing. Red Hat is sort of really putting our contributions here. It seems like a lot of yesterday was about simplifying the experience from zero to getting up and running in like five steps versus 70 steps or something like that. I can't remember what exact numbers were. Yeah, 70 steps or three steps or something. Yeah, it's something like that. I like that. That's a good reduction. I'll take that. And also there was a discussion about the marketplace that, and Spotify, who was one of the founders of this and kind of came out of their dev shop, right? But they're opening up a marketplace. And I think you guys are actually contributing into that as well. I can speak to that. Spotify is creating a marketplace called Spotify Marketplace to have these plugins. And we are partners there. We are putting our plugins in there as well. One of the ideas I was talking about is that the community, Spotify Marketplace is their marketplace, but we want to also have a community marketplace where the plugins are validated. Right now, anybody can add a plugin to Backstage, which is no provenance, no security check. You don't know whether it's going to be maintained, whether it's going to be updated next time. It's going to break next time you use it. So it's a big problem for enterprises to say, I want to use this plugin. Like, who wrote it? Somebody, one single person wrote it two years ago. You forgot about it. So that's a big problem. So what I was sort of asking the community to work around is that, hey, let's create a self-service validation process. So everybody knows you're getting a secure plugin. We also work with ISP partners to make sure that it's validated and maintained. Like there's some sort of compatibility or release or release. Because these are the problems. Large company adopts it. They have 10 plugins. Nothing is maintained. It's breaking. Dollar per cent, this is no different from what I have already. So it's still, I think, like I said, it's the early innings of Backstage and this thing. But we'll get there. It totally makes sense. And I think what's exciting about it is bringing the developers to a central place to be able to see that and be able to then go to the next step and actually get to coding faster. And I think that's a big piece of it as well. It's everyone's shared goal here, really, across the board. I think we all want to make more cool stuff quicker with ease and reduce that cognitive load. Speaking of, and speaking of education, we've got a little book here you wanted to share a little bit about, correct? Yeah, this is, yeah. We create this, I mean, part of what we do is we try to create the content that is needed in order to convince the companies why an internet developer platform. It's a term called IDP that is becoming more and more relevant why you need to build an internal developer platform, why this is important for you as a company. So we deliver this book, that is developer portals, explaining why this is important, explaining how do you build it, why a template is important, what are the basic concepts that you need to incorporate, the role of the developer, the platform engineer. So we create this book. We offer this book for free. Here is the QR code that we offer to all our customers yesterday. And we launched it here at KubeCon yesterday. I love this. So everyone can just scan away and- Yeah, scan, go to the booths, and yeah. And we have a PDF, it's available for free. So we'll be more not happy to have people- We're doing a shameless little talk right here. I love it, I love it, I love it. I will gladly be the spokesperson for your educational tools any time, free of charge. This is really exciting. So what has you, I mean, it's such an exciting week for you. You're probably getting to meet a lot of your community for the first time. Balaji, I'm going to start with you. What's the most exciting part of this week for you? I mean, you know, to see the energy of everybody interested in backstage and developer tools, developer productivity in general, it's great. And I lead the developer productivity, developer tools product management team. And so we have a lot of tools besides backstage. You know, we have apartment desktop, we have other tools there to help developer become more productive. So I'm really excited about the energy that people have. I think the keynote today, as you said, they're talking about developer productivity. And I'm really excited that what I'm doing is affecting the world. So it's great. What a wonderful thing. What a great way to sum that all up. What a nice feeling. What I'm doing is affecting the world. Yes, it is. In a positive way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, very much. What about you, Ignacio? For me, the most important is, as you know, Red Hat has been always a company very focused on the IT, on the platform engineers, some OpenShift, Rail. We are moving that into a more developer-friendly company, giving and creating tools, like what Bellagio is creating, convincing developers why some tools like Pullman Desktop or others are how they can use those new tools, contributing into the open source projects. So we are moving Red Hat not only to become that platform company that has been always being there, but to become a more developer-friendly company and how developers can benefit of that. So we are very excited about communicating and explaining all of that in our booth. I love that. Lots of reasons to be excited. I have one final lightning round question for you because you mentioned that contributor story, the Spotify story. Who's on your Spotify wrapped, Bellagio? Who's on my what? Your Spotify wrapped. It's almost that time of year. There's going to be some embarrassing musicians. There's going to be some exciting ones. Anything you want to share? I was surprised yesterday because of Spotify. I was like, this is a music company. I mean, and they are contributing into open source and you see the engineers like, wow, you are really thinking beyond what is your core business. That if you think about it, it's music. So they have an incredible team of developers just going into the stage and talking about, no, no, no, no, we contribute to the CNCF. I mean, they didn't really talk about the music. They talk about the technology that allows and power everyone to use that music. So that is exciting to be some customers doing that. To answer your question, I like techno. So I like, yeah, I'm here for it. I want to swore on the queue. I saved myself right there. Very down for the techno. Nice. Who's your favorite DJ right now? It's, you know, they're losing it, you know, like for sure. Oh, nice. Oh, great choice. He's losing it all the time. That's all right. Say your soundtrack. Rob, you got any confessions about your Spotify rap to your playlist right now? It would be King's Father Christmas is soon up after Thanksgiving, so. All right, we're already into the carols. There we go. Fantastic. Well, on that note, have yourself a merry little afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Ignacio Balaji. Rob, thank you so much for being here on this exciting segment. This was a lot of fun. I can't wait to see how the rest of the week goes for y'all. My name is Savannah Peterson. We are here in Chicago at CubeCon. Thank you all for tuning in to the leading source for high tech coverage, The Cube. Thank you.