With over 1,000 companies using it and 21.5K+ stars on GitHub, the Backstage open source project is quickly becoming a go-to tool for managing developer infrastructure. In this episode, I’ll sit down with Lee Mills, a Senior Engineering Manager from Spotify's Backstage project, to learn more about how the open source platform is revolutionizing the developer experience and how it aligns with the growing Internal Developer Platform (IDP) space. We’ll discuss the need that drove Spotify to build this internal tool, about the decision and journey to open source it and donate it to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). We’ll also discuss the new commercial plugins, what’s coming up on the roadmap, and much more.
Lee has worked as an engineering manager for the past 12 years, from Amazon to Spotify and everything in between. Prior to that Lee had a mixed background working in academia as a lecturer, worked as a Boom Op for television in the UK and lived in more places than he can count.
The episode was live-streamed on 17 May 2023 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/W3c4YJ71BOQ
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Show Notes:
01:44 Spotify Engineering internal need for Backstage
07:09 Backstage and Platform Engineering
10:33 Backstage components: Templates, Catalogue and Plugins
15:31 Why Spotify open-sourced Backstage
21:45 from Spotify’s internal Hack Week to a viral growth
25:19 a perfect community contributed feature in 24 hours
28:48 new Backstages use cases for Banking and healthcare
30:54 Spotify released commercial plugins for Backstage
36:51 How to follow Backstage discussion and Lee Mills
39:08 KubeCon Europe updates
40:51 Prometheus remote-write is standardized
41:32 Sunsetting OpenCensus
42:31 ECS to merge with OpenTelemetry specification
43:22 progress to stabilize Logs in OpenTelemetry
45:02 MicroProfile v6.0 support OpenTelemetry Traces
45:40 Grafana 9.5 release
Resources:
Backstage website: https://backstage.io
Kubecon Europe 2023 talk: The State of Backstage in 2023: https://youtu.be/vskefrlvocE
Kubecon Europe 2023 talk: Lunar building an internal compliance platform using Backstage: https://youtu.be/6T3Mf6pdg7E
Backstage accepted as CNCF incubation project: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2022/03/15/backstage-project-joins-the-cncf-incubator/
Socials:
Dotan Horovits
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Twitter: @horovits
LinkedIn: in/horovits
Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon
Lee Mills
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codetoy
Mastodon: @leem@mastodon.social
