Backstage Introduction, KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2022

Composed by Itay Talmi, Cloud Native Applications Senior Consultant, following his attendance at KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2022.

Thanks to TeraSky’s education program, I recently attended KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain.

The experience was incredible. While there were many interesting technical sessions on many exciting topics, I was most curious about Backstage – which has sparked my interest ever since I started exploring VMware Tanzu Application Platform (TAP).

I decided to attend a session entitled “Backstage: Restoring Order to Your Chaos,” given by Spotify software engineer Dave Zolotusky. Going into the session, I was stunned by the huge line of people trying to get into the room. That was something I had never seen before in any other session. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to secure one of the last seats.

Dave’s session was outstanding. In his talk, he reviewed the evolution of Backstage and thoroughly explained the kind of challenges it aims to solve. He explained that Backstage seeks to provide a single frontend for the entire infrastructure, unifying all your tooling, services, apps, data, and docs in a single UI, increasing developer productivity. It enables any developer to quickly create new software aligned to a set of best practices, manage all the software in one centralized location, and explore the entire software ecosystem, which makes collaboration across the organization much easier. It is entirely focused on developer experience, and as described by Dave, “it is an open platform for building developer portals.”

One thing I hadn’t realized is that Backstage was originally created at Spotify, then was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)! It is actually collectively owned by a rapidly growing opensource community, has 16k+ stars on GitHub, 2k+ project forks, 500+ contributors, and 60+ opensource plugins. It is extremely exciting and indicates that the community is really embracing Backstage.

I’m very excited to see how Backstage grows as a project, and I will be continuing to track how different companies integrate it into their environment.

In the next part of this series, I’ll describe how VMware uses Backstage to enable a developer-focused frontend to Tanzu Application Platform (TAP).