all right well i thought we should open this week we before we recorded we were talking a little bit about how uh this time of year all of a sudden someone starts thinking about christmas and then halloween but here's here's my question i have not done the thorough research for so it might be a short question but over over there over there across the the channel across the atlantic depending on where you are do do y'all have candy corn is that part of your culture candy corn not by that word but i'm sure it basically means chocolates and sweets in which case yes it is it is in the sweet zone but uh but candy corn is specifically it's this little gooey thing that it looks like a um well it's called candy corn but it looks more like a extracted tooth you know if you pull the tooth out and the root is there it kind of like that that triangular thing but let's it it would probably sell poorly if it was called candy extracted tooth i'm guessing but you're not telling me on it so far do we have it no i'm not missing it thus far but let's imagine an elongated kernel of corn right so kind of that shape and elongated and and and i forget the order but it's basically there's stripes of orange white and brown and uh i don't know it has kind of a slightly distinct like uh kind of like gooey taste candy corn big big in the states during it's only a halloween candy you don't really see it any other time i'm i'm sorry i've not i can't source this for you no i haven't seen this stuff i was in a store yesterday that did caro carry uh hershey bars and reese's cups and that sort of stuff but it was it was boxed in a fancy box and sold as a new york selection or something like a new york selection that's fantastic yeah there was like different types with different stuff in there yeah all brands that you would recognize uh you know being being from the part of the world that you're from but um but that's the best i've got uh i've seen candy candy canes that look like yeah well i'll have to find maybe for the show art or at least a link i'll have to find a picture of
2:01candy corn maybe i'll even do a little bit of extra research and find some sort of uh educational uh video about the history of candy corn but it is uh yeah it's just some weird i guess regional thing that we have i was i was you know i was back in the states for our vmware explorer and i bought like four bags of it to bring back here to the netherlands for our own uh our own uh halloween excitement well before we get started i think that makes you a dealer that's right yes yes i've not seen that on the prohibited list for planes though yeah yeah they you have to pay extra duties on candy corn i hope not i hope not well before we do get to our our you know our news wrap up uh of the last few weeks or several several weeks actually uh you know as as i'm sure we three all know we have our our uh we had vmware explorer which we'll get into here briefly but our next big conference here in vmware tanzu land is the uh the SpringOne conference which we have december 6th and 8th also in san francisco so i'll uh maybe there'll be some sales on candy corn uh when i get there we'll see if it lasts that long but uh you know if you want to check that out i think there's a a first round of talks selected i don't know if they're posted yet but if you go to SpringOne.io you can check that out and i have a special discount code now now ed i want you to guess how much you get off when i give you this discount code it's going to be difficult so put your thinking cap on 100 it's got to be 100 well that would be nice it it's it's it's close so you know with that logic when you hear the code it almost looks like you get paid to go but the discount code is just Coté 200 that's cot 200 now other than 200 off what do you think what do you and that would be great you would actually make money by traveling now what what what do you how much money do you think you get off if you use that code so it could be 200 candy corns okay this is a good guess it could be 200 pence uh-huh pounds 200 dollars i could go on i'm going for 200 that's right well the only way the listeners
4:05will know is if they actually register and use the code and then and then they can find out uh which one it is but uh yeah so just go to SpringOne.io and check it out i think i think all of us would highly recommend uh going there i i don't know if y'all have been involved in looking over talks but i have and there's uh there's many great ones there which which will be fun so as mentioned this was last week right ben that we had vmware explore i've i've lost track a little bit i had i had a little vacation uh after that so i had like some double traveling i think i know where i am and what's going on but last week we had vmware explore formerly called vm world uh and i was there i did a lot of a lot of things but but tell me uh from afar ben i know you watched several things what what was uh what was going on there what were the the highlights that you had of of watching from uh from afar well there were many but but what springs to mind immediately is just how beautiful it looked right the uh i'm thinking specifically about the the keynote which folks will be able to uh it's called the general session where folks will be able to watch that online now we'll we'll put some uh a link in the show notes but uh absolutely beautifully stage managed production looked really nice the folks who were on there were super engaged uh deshaun made a particular name for himself by uh using the phrase jazzed and pumped people were making t-shirts with this afterwards there was a lot of energy in the room it was very very engaging uh piece of tv to watch it was just like a really well managed piece of tv so it was if you haven't seen it you should go online to the um vmware.com slash explore have a look through the the sessions look for the general session but yeah it was it was really good and then and then of course there was lots of announcements in there so there were things like um vmware aria which is a a new uh sort of suite of tools to help you manage and inspect and and govern everything that you've got in your cloud space so lots of uh lots of big news also lots of small things going on you know little
6:12bits of news just small increments of things adding along but it all adds up to a huge pile of stuff i think so um well worth checking out i would say go to vmware.com slash explore and have a look around at all the videos that are listed there which went on super fast like within hours videos were starting to appear on the conference website and that that very very rarely happens you know none of that waiting a month to see you know what someone said last october it's kind of like there straight away so you should go and check it out that's yeah yeah big thing isn't it covid made sure because all the conferences went online the expectation now is stuff's there straight away so which is great from my point of view i'd much rather have things available straight away you can't possibly be in every session watch everything but you want to know if i didn't catch that one in person and i wasn't there either i can go online and watch that so yeah i agree 100 it's kind of like you know we we do all this effort to get it online and get people to know about it and use twitter and you know linkedin and various other places so folks are engaged and they know what's happening and then if they can't access it it's really frustrating so i love the fact that it was so fast and instantaneous and all of those sort of keynotes from all the different um business groups were also put on really quickly as well they all look great so yeah i thought that was good but michael you were there what was it like pacing around the show floor how many steps did you do uh you know what stood out for you well definitely pacing i mean i think when you go to a conference you you uh you end up having like 10 000 to 15 000 steps if if you're doing it i i think i i uh i'm a bit lazy so i maybe only 10 000 steps is is what i got you know i have i don't know if it's professional to admit this but i have this practice of watching the keynote from my hotel room uh just because the streaming is really nice and then you can enjoy some in-room coffee kind of relax uh so that probably cut down my steps not
8:14not walking around there but yeah it was uh you know i hadn't been to the the musconi or i was asking someone how to pronounce that in italian and they suggested it would be muscone so i don't know where that e ended up at the end there because i think the guy it's named after was of italian origins whatever uh but yeah it was nice and you know i haven't uh i haven't seen all the operations people in a long time like i go to a lot of devops days and they're slightly different than the operations people that you see uh at at a at a vm world or vmware explorer so it was fun to run to them and all the vendors and yeah there was uh there was a lot of people there and the the show floor as it were all your all your big brands and then the people that you know you got your fujitsu's your ibm's your aws's your google clouds and then all sorts of small booths there was one guy who was the um who is he he's like i'm gonna embarrass myself by not remembering he's like the cto advisor and he brought a whole airstream trailer in there and had a lot of interviews there you go and uh i think he had a good joke at twitter that like you know you should come over here to see our ten thousand dollar carpet uh that cost them ten thousand dollars just to get a carpet in there and uh which is fine and so related to that like what the i gave two talks uh while i was there and um i don't know if they'll be posted publicly i'll have to find and download them uh so that i have them preserved for all time in my time capsule but what is public uh is we we did uh we had a stage setup where we did uh i think it was five or six sort of presentation slash interviews uh with various people from the kind of like i don't know infrastructury cloud startup world people like uh uh from uh like dagger and docker and uh spotify about backstage things and uh several other companies but what i'm going to put at the end of this episode is uh an interview i wasn't there uh but my my co-host alex williams was there and it's i'm going to put on the back of this episode an interview that he did with uh jen kelly from from spotify going over
10:18backstage and i just watched it this morning and it's it's a pretty good overview of what the deal with with backstage is and also the the kind of experience that spotify has uh putting it out there and uh i think i think in some of the future episodes i'll put some other interviews uh to accompany our new segment here uh with it and really if you want to see them ongoing i'll put a link in the show notes at tonsutalk.com if you want to get a little preview of the the interviews and presentations if you can't wait for it to come out in the feed here but uh speaking of releases there was also a kubernetes release that came out i think 1.25 what uh so ed what are some highlights of that release because that that is the thing that everyone seems to care about the the kubernetes the substrate that that's providing so much fun in our industry so what's new and fun in it so uh well new and fun you know fun or or new doesn't have to be fun you i think we'll stick with just new actually it is a bit of that right i look at this very much and i think so a lot of what is in there is sort of security it's stuff graduating from what used to be beta into stable there's a lot less of the we now have storage there's a csi interface kind of stuff which in our world was fun hey we can do storage or we've refined networking now we're getting down to the as always last security yeah it's never last but it is you know with that bolting into it's the security so if we ever look if i where's my notes i gave myself somewhere i've lost them there we go uh ephemeral pods that's one that's been sort of coming for a while right so the issue of not being able to do debugging because maybe your container image has none of the tools that you need in it um and you're stuck in a catch-22 you've got a pod you need to do some diagnosis you can't do anything these the ephemeral pods are designed sort of help you spin up something alongside your pod just for the sake of debugging and then um so it'll be interesting to see once that gets into kind of the base kubernetes how it gets used by everybody else everyone has observability and other things built around it how are they going to you know that basic
12:20functionality how will it get used by everybody i love this one i think i think this is much needed to be honest because it caters to folks like me who are completely useless most of the time when it comes to really digging into what's going on inside kubernetes you know uh so you know the idea that you could spin up an extra pod temporarily that has a whole bunch of tooling in it that you might be familiar with rather than a hardened pod where it's all been stripped away to reduce the um you know the security footprint of it uh i think i could see myself going straight to the documentation for that and giving that a try once it appears in you know some of these cloud providers uh online i reckon so i i think that's a good one that's a really good one yeah and i'm sure that's going to make its way into all their exams like the ckin things that's just going to be bread and butter in no time at all um i remember doing that and just the number of times you had to do various arcane command lines just to try and troubleshoot something whole new topic for that brilliant well not that i want to do that again um so what else was in there there was some stuff around uh grace periods termination and so essentially when you're talking you know is your pod in a ready state is it not termination status all those kind of uh ready probes there's some extra functionality in there to just help with stability um so min ready seconds um so again they're you know they're little tweaks they're right down at the very low level but they're just the kind of thing that you're getting to where everyone says actually the settings that are currently there aren't quite enough i want something a little more precise that'll do the trick um so they'll just find some little use case where everyone says that solves my my little itch particularly i don't have to write some custom code or controllers i can just have it built in um i see notes here from you ben time zoning cron jobs which i've never really thought about but yeah like anything you sometimes just need to know i got caught out by time zones because i was on holiday for a couple of weeks so i did the stuff you'd have thought they i mean i guess i have so right i was in spain i booked in a couple of meetings while i was on holiday um bad me maybe so my calendar automatically said hey you're in spain let me book those in the
14:24central european time zone i didn't know i was doing that so i booked it in at you know midday when i thought the meeting was at home and all every meeting i booked was like an hour out because it assumed my time zone i didn't know that ah chaos i'm sure for a cron job where you could be you know installing it in china from you know the us or whatever cron job not me you're just telling it okay this this this time of day this day you know this regular you don't really set a time zone on it so i'd never thought of it before either but it seems like oh yeah oh yeah we have that so having that go stable that sounds good and um c groups as well i i definitely remember having some compatibility issues with c groups um because as you move between different uh operating systems i think like different linux versions depending on the kernel you've got you'll get either c groups v1 or c groups v2 you've got v2 it'll stop certain things happening i definitely remember sticking points there so it's nice to see that uh you know that stuff's all moving along like i said small increments but you know they can make a big difference to some folks depending on what issues they're seeing i think so yeah it's good yeah and hopefully the fact we're getting down to these smaller features means the whole thing is getting more stable right because whether it's c groups or not as you said it can be a little kernel difference what you want to get to is less of that variance more of just you know everyone's happy with this version don't change it because the least the more things change the more things break so we want to be getting down to actually there is less and less and less changing i think this release that it had 40 changes or something compared to 46 and the one before so there's still some but i said i think compared to the early releases you're hard pressed now to see big bang stuff it's all nice to have rather than can't believe that wasn't there before just fun things around the edges essentially yeah yeah you know it seems like time zones are such a problem maybe there should be a practice in any sort of like you know uh time debasing at this
16:24level of computational or of the the computational world where like it always just makes you double check and it's like here are three example time zones this is actually going to be in in case uh in case it gets messed up because it uh always a problem just exactly time zones should be so simple but they still confuse me i still have multiple clocks on like my pull out on mac os and other things and still somehow somebody asks me stuff i my brain still struggles over the hang on is that forward behind people like my my brother lives in canada there's always that so when he said thursday at five in the morning what time is that for them is it friday night yes you know it's ridiculously difficult for something so simple yeah hey i've got an idea why don't we just make everyone use gmt everyone has to get up a gmt you know 70 mgmt or whatever yeah how convenient for some people that would fix the problem right that's right that's right maybe we should there should be some national treaty where we just randomly select a time zone and for forever we just go with that just like who who the great times and we could really make it complicated by doing it every year and uh uh we'll figure out what the time we could do it with the drop of the of the ball in new york on new york you know be like and then when it gets to the bottom it says whichever time zone is going to be this year's time i like i like that that that will will uh we'll suggest that maybe to some sort of iso or itef group or an rfc process i'm not sure of course if if it picks one of the ones you know say china the ball would drop it would be new year and then you'd be like right go home it's over already i'm gonna go forward that's right exactly well also well also right go through it alphabetically oh that's a good idea then you can anticipate it and plan and plan ahead and pst will be right near the bottom totally well also it looks like you know uh going way back in time everyone remembers uh heroku in fact i think i think that drove a lot
18:29of uh what what uh what we have nowadays you know the the great the great paths from long ago uh also the origin of the 12 factor uh application manifesto as i recall which uh you know i always like to say one of the best pieces of technical marketing ever created it's fantastic that these things were outlined and lasted this long uh but it looks like finally i'm glad i saw this because finally they're going to uh not finally as if it's inevitable but they're going to phase out the free tier that they have which i think my other podcast software defined talk relies on that to make it easy to sign up for slack because i'm not sure if this maybe we'll have to finally move to discord where you can actually just sign up for it without having a special invitation but i think we're going to have to uh we're going to have to have an emergency strategy session and bring in the product managers over at that podcast to figure out what to do but hit the nail on the head though that's exactly the problem isn't it there's there's hundreds of thousands of hobbyists and other sort of undocumented uses of these uh of these platforms and it's a it's a big deal for some when they go away i reckon yeah especially at that i mean it's uh so so many nice things about heroku and and people like ourselves who have taken advantage of those nice things for free and i i am never one to uh begrudge people uh making sure that they have a good business behind them and uh it's it's uh i mean they launched in like 2007 or six i think so uh they're uh it do you pronounce it largesse they're uh they're they're giving away to the community has has been plenty but we'll see uh yeah they still they still even today uh contribute a great deal don't they to the build pack um open source for example that's right there's an awful lot going on with build packs uh to this day buildpacks.io very popular paquetta of course is included in some of our stuff and and we use them uh a lot to make sure that containers are secure and that that also um you know is helped along immensely by heroku and they
20:32still contribute to that today but uh what what made me chuckle was the fact that they have a minecraft bill pack yeah i hadn't seen that before what are people gonna do if they can't run that for free it's so sad it's like taking the toys away from the kids at christmas really isn't it it's like surely someone will do like you know you can get all the the unified networking gear and it has to run its own little software to find controller in the cloud and then someone run a business hostify where they said you know what they're again it's kind of thousands of little hobbyists and home labbers all want to run their one vm somewhere i will just set up a dedicated service for it so someone might take the minecraft bit of haraco and go there you go free minecraft haraco being built in with some microsoft advertising who knows but i figure they'll find a way especially with minecraft oh there's plenty of choices for minecraft servers yeah you can do you can do that and you can get free ones in the cloud but they are managed by someone else and you sort of have to jump through their hoops and you know they're always basically trying to hold you upside down by your ankles to see how much money they can get out of you so yeah having an ability to just run it for free on heroku such a shame that build back will be a bit you know neglected maybe i don't know but all these kids will be why why daddy what's this what's happened to our server never well well maybe maybe over there in salesforce tower this is part of the new uh monetization strategies they might start charging for uh they'll have a special dynamo for the minecraft dynamo or whatever they call it nowadays that and you know they don't want to do the upside down ankle trick it'll have a reasonable uh fee for it maybe you can even use what's the currency they have in minecraft just coins maybe you could uh probably emeralds i reckon yeah oh yeah that's something that was their biz dev people will call it microsoft and get some uh alliance going around uh using the currency to pay for uh for heroku well also uh speaking of of long stayed mature things it looks like uh you know i i didn't dig into this so so maybe one of you two can go over but it looks like nginx
22:36the uh i think they're probably i haven't checked in a long time but they at one point they were like the number one used uh web server out there uh for people but they're they're used in all sorts of stuff but what uh what have they been talking about recently what's the news that i missed there so they put out a blog post which and i didn't know much about the background i'm like you i just i knew nginx is everywhere and still is everywhere it's used in every example and every tutorial and everything else um so it caught me a bit by surprise but the blog post is almost the tone comes across as kind of apologetic of essentially we've got the tone wrong we've been monetizing stuff almost too much or getting the wrong balance between what goes in open source what goes in commercial versions and they it kind of felt like they felt like they'd got that balance wrong missed a bit of a boat so the blog was saying we're actually going to you know take stock and change course and we've heard a lot of feedback from a lot of users so we're going to rebalance what features we put where how we develop things going forwards um they've been looking at the new gateway api and saying that seems to be the future and i'm guessing that wasn't for them beforehand maybe they hadn't seen that so much um and i think some of it is just rationalizing right they had like at least three different versions they caused some sort of confusion between product versions um and they you know i guess in some ways it's quite good of them to stand up and say i kind of got something wrong and we're going to fix it um yeah that wasn't nginx or my dog yeah my my dog is my dog is very excited about the the new direction over there a vote of confidence i think i had uh as always i wondered which one of us was under attack uh yes yeah it's it's probably uh you know a delivery notification from from uh my my dog there you know you know speaking of notifications so the i think the last thing to go over much like my dog is an event driven system uh that notifies me of things it looks like amazon has published uh you know some examples of uh serverless code snippets out there which i think i think i am always uh
24:39curious about how how the dream of serverless is going and maybe it's just because i don't have the right google alerts or rss feeds set up but i don't uh i don't get informed about it uh too much but i'll have to go over there and browse the uh the snippets and see like see what people are doing with it do y'all do y'all encounter like a a lot of serverless stuff out there like what's how's the momentum around that seem to be doing uh you make the right you make the right point in that it's it's it's really hard to say exactly how you know how it's doing i couldn't tell you the health i couldn't give you a health check on that on that particular thing i know it's always been you know for me speaking personally as uh you know previously being a developer for a long time it was always something that was on the to-do list but never really graduated to the must-have list you know i must do this it was always the to-do's rather than the must-do's and um that's a shame you know because i feel like i'm missing out a little bit on on what's going on in that uh in in that space perhaps and these snippets seemed like a really good way to try and just take a look and understand what's happening in that area and how you might be able to get started in that area and have useful code in in that area uh these particular ones from aws what i liked about them was was that they um covered lots of different aspects of things that you might want to do in your um serverless applications and they had uh code samples for multiple languages which i also thought was was a really good way of sort of you know meeting people where they are the website looks great the search facility looks great it's really well laid out the code snippets look really easy to follow it looked really well thought out and i like that about it so so i'm all for anything that sort of empowers people to try things out and to you know maybe get the best out of them even though i'm not
26:42getting the best out of them in this particular case so another link to put on the for later list yeah definitely yeah yeah we should definitely do that i think uh it was it was it was uh it was a nicely done site definitely well you know looking through that reminded me of uh you know i'm i've as many of us i've been curious about like what what the deal with backstage is and and uh how to describe it and i don't know if we have like a great pat way of describing it yet maybe we do but uh it does seem like you know obviously this list of serverless stuff is public but it seems like like this kind of uh here are examples of using uh services and code like that's one nice thing it seems like you can do when you set up uh how you're using backstage have your kind of portal you know in the tons of application platform we have like a couple of api browsing and documentation things like that but it was uh making me think of that speaking of which that's the news that we have for this week and and if you're uh if you're listening to this wait what you can hear next is uh an interview with uh jen kelly going over you know she works over at spotify she's worked at google cloud and other people and there's an interview with my friend alex williams from vmware explore as we talked earlier about uh kind of going over what backstage is and maybe i've listened to it maybe i need to go back and listen to it again to get really that that very pat phrase understanding of what exactly backstage is other than my explanation is like a intranet portal site for developers which is about as thrilling an explanation as it sounds i think anytime you can work intranet and portal into the same phrase you should probably just throw that into the trash and start over again uh because it doesn't i don't know that doesn't really get my my my excited blood boiling or anything it sounds like a time machine exactly the next thing that we're going to start talking about is uh is collaboration software and web 2.0 and how that how that that goes well hey i tell you what if i think back to my you know previous life uh as an architect this is brilliant right back every time i hear something
28:46new about backstage i dig into a little bit further i love it more and more it's exactly what you need if you're trying to do that whole sort of developer relations piece around this is how we used to work and this is how we now work you know how we now want to approach modernization and microservices and all those sorts of things it's got so many tools to help you with that exercise of education and um you know articulation of what it is that you want to do i think it's absolutely brilliant i'm really looking forward to this one all right all right well that was the news for this week and if you want to uh get the show notes you go to tonsutalk.com you can find links and other stuff like that and of course as i always like to advise people when it comes to podcasts when when you whether you whether you're doing it at work or or at home you need to uh log into all the devices that you have and subscribe them to this podcast now if you've got multiple softwares you got the apple podcast thing you might be using uh overcast maybe the stitcher just subscribe to it everywhere you don't actually have to ever listen to it just make sure that it's downloading because that's that's ultimately uh what what uh i don't know it's fun essentially so subscribe to it everywhere force your children to subscribe and listen to it and they will become better people uh i guarantee it but you get your money back if uh if if i do not fulfill that promise so we'll see everyone next week and enjoy the uh the backstage interview all right that's a good pause all right i'm still streaming you have anything you want to tell the uh the streamers well uh they should probably um check out talks you know if if they're like learning and like i do then they should check out the talks at vmware.com slash explore because there's there's loads on there yours is probably there michael i'm pretty sure one of mine is there um as well so so yeah go and have a look at those because there's tons and tons of content there and
30:47i've only scratched the surface and i'm already really uh pleased with uh all the different assets that have come out of that i think it's it's like a winning lottery card you scratch the surface and you win no no matter what that's i don't know about that one every year i get a list of all the talks and i'm like i didn't catch them at the time i will watch them later next year i look back at our list i didn't watch any i don't know at the time i've got to do it now or yeah we we i think i think the three of us and probably everyone else in the world has that uh what was it the uh look at it later pile which is also known as the look at it never pile i think i never worked in my gag about heroku being uh no not heroku engine x being 18 years old there's so many things you can do legally now you're 18. that would have been a whole bunch of gags in there but uh maybe next start start having some drinks driving voting depending on what country you're in it's uh you can you can serve time in a real prison oh yes yeah yeah maybe that's why they change course you know i i you know but because back back in the states you can't really drink alcohol to your 21 at one point i think in the 80s if you were in louisiana like so many things in louisiana you could drink when you were 16 or 18 i forget but like it was uh it was always consternating for us teenagers that we could uh we could be drafted to go be in the military but we couldn't uh get a drink and you know in this this strange area but it was probably for the better you're licensed by gun but not to actually have a drink probably that also that also seemed even so yeah that also seems like a good idea separation of concerns i think they would call it in architecture circles exactly all right well speaking of good ideas we should wrap this up and uh we'll see everyone next week bye bye bye thanks
32:47well jen so i i walked into the keynotes yesterday and had some briefings beforehand and backstage kept coming up in conversation and then music to my ears yeah i bet it is and no pun intended exactly no do you have any playlists that you'd recommend i mean uh rap caviar is probably the most most famous okay of the humalgorithm that's like our editorial team plus the algorithm doing its job nice butter is also very nice butter i love that one yeah i mean i build my own playlists pretty maniacally so do you yeah how many do you have oh my gosh i have probably at least like 150 playlists wow you did then do you organize them by like classical or hip-hop or genre absolutely well i do i do one semi-periodic i used to do it like weekly for my team because i was very good oh you were playlist okay and now i do it less frequently oh gosh i'm gonna have to talk to you later about some playlists that you'd recommend but butter and wrap caviar i like that so anyway so it kept coming up the conversation it kept coming up in conversation and i'm like backstage backstage backstage all i'm hearing is backstage but i've heard a lot about backstage before and you know the new stack we've written about backstage and we've written about spotify's open source efforts um what do you see is reflective in vmware that they're talking about it so much i mean obviously you just detailed a lot of the reasons why but how does it serve as a solution because you just brought up vmware with different solutions providers that are helping enable people's use of building developer experiences yeah well i'd really categorize vmware as like the forefront provider in terms of like pushing this i mean this the tagline of this conference is the center of the multi-cloud universe right and that's like vmware's sweet spot and what they're doing with with tap and with the tanzu application platform is they've built not only
34:47has vm is vmware an adopter of backstage so they've built their own their own developer portal that their teams utilize you know the 10 000 plus developers at vmware utilize which is great but they also made it the front end of tap so you can't use you can't use uh tap without using backstage and that's like extremely exciting for us you know we have this very um big ambition to see more spotify built software in all kinds of companies big and small and we vmware is is a really critical partner for us to do that so for those who may not be familiar what does tap stand for i believe it stands for the tanzu application application platform there we go i was asking i'm like am i using am i using the acronym incorrectly i was asking you because i was trying to figure it out myself i have an old reporter trick um but uh yeah okay so they have built their own platform to manage their own developer teams as i understand it that tap is sort of or tanzu is more is is like the new paas it's the new platform as a service yeah and i think that's kind of badass because i feel like paas got a rap a bad rap in the mid the mid aughts mid to late aughts bad rap a bad rap because people wanted control and they wanted vm's and i don't think that they want that anymore yeah and people want to be more hip a little bit yeah yeah because like that helps you like be more modern that helps you be more flexible to some degree yeah i mean i think like microservices and kubernetes have have won the day we've seen that over the past decade you think so i believe so okay i feel like that's probably the most obvious thing to say in 2022 okay yeah i think it's fair i think it's fair so what are the use cases you see from like other companies and there must be companies that are in all kinds of sectors of the market that are using it now considering the usage that you're seeing from it what are some of the use cases you're seeing that are interesting to you the use cases that we're seeing that are you know so
36:51it's like we we often tell people don't start with the software catalog because create ingesting all of your software and building it into this centrally managed repository is a lot of work particularly if you have like us like tens of thousands of software components and like getting all that that is a big bite of the elephant if you will so yes we often counsel external adopters to start narrow and what we often see and i think this is going to segue into something you and i talked about before is our documentation is a mess we don't know where it is and there's like 80 different microsites and that's kind of one of the places we started with as well so you know we often are like hey you know start with tech docs and start with figuring out how you can like encourage you know this kind of virtuous cycle of folks writing direct you know writing their foot their their documentation in markdown directly alongside this docs like quote solution that we built um start by cleaning up your documentation start by determining whether or not you want to set up some you know with software templates and scaffold or like whether like what are your sort of we call them at spotify the golden paths so these like architectural patterns that we believe are kind of the best ways to do things and can you can you kind of like really start to bring and standardize in a way that is not like sort of mandating but more encouraging folks to build in the patterns that you want them to build in so let's review once again the three major themes for backstage create manage explore so tell me okay create first create first create first is really getting alluding to software templates and scaffolder which is about being able to like create new software quite easily right that's aligns to best practice practices so that's that standardization piece you know okay and and that then that all of that software whatever you've created you can manage in this one centralized repository which is the software
38:51catalog and that's oftentimes what people think of as sort of the the sort of like backbone of a developer portal or like of this kind of single unified ui is the ability to see where all services and components are running regardless of how and where they're running and then getting to see you know the metadata attached to that and who owns it and the documentation right alongside it within this within the software catalog so that's kind of like that's the re the repo if you will like the centralized repository of software okay and then on the explore side all right that's about and we have sort of a search platform that's a bit of byo search engine and it allows folks to ensure that there's really really effective search so that when people are like within their their dev portal built off of backstage when developers are are trying to find stuff they can easily find it like the search entities will come up that they that for the right stuff they'll be brought towards the right towards the right material that will then give them the information they need based on on on the other two did you build your own search or did you go to like an open source project for that search is such an interesting one because that was one where we we definitely had an internal version but versus like kind of externalizing that version in a way we went to the community and said what do you need and then we built it alongside alongside the con the contributor community so elastic then yeah and there's the there's elastic there's postgres there's everything that you could need like it's really like which one do you want okay okay um and tell me i'm curious about the documentation focus you put on it what was the internal discussions about that like why did you just you were saying that there were documentation matters you were trying to resolve internally at the time yes that must have been part of what were some of the matters you're trying to resolve i definitely wasn't there but i think the biggest thing is a little bit more of what i described was that this doc the documentation was kind of a mess it wasn't up to date there was really no like there's no mandate to keep it up to date and there was and it was sort of scattered over a multitude of
40:51different sites so if something did have documentation you which was a big if then you weren't able to find it or the documentation would be outdated very quickly and that is where the docs like code solution of tech docs came from and it's it's you know it's it's deployed directly out of backstage so it lives inside of backstage so it lived inside of backstage okay so it was easily accessible very easily accessible and something that people could then people could really easily look up the documentation know that it was up to date and it was being and it was right alongside the code there was a conversation on twitter the other day about trying to find documents in a very popular uh platform starts with a g second word d starts with d oh okay anyway but and then it was google docs i don't need to be yeah yeah i'm like all righty but um i used to where i was at google cloud for seven years yeah so what they did was you said they said you know people were saying it's difficult to find docs sometimes you have a lot of docs in google docs and a lot of people like myself included rely on recent so these are the kind of developer experience issues you must have to think about all the time constantly like so how did you resolve these kinds of issues how did you start thinking about them i mean how what is the community like internally at spotify to like that enables that kind of discussion and get to the place where you are well i don't think we're done yet by any means you know like there's so much more that we can do with backstage internally and it is where we are now bringing a lot of that external innovation from the community like the core maintainers of the open source project are managing roughly 100 pull requests per week and 80 of those are coming from non-maintainer contributors contributors so it's safe to say the innovation within the open source project is coming from the external community and now we're pulling that in but i think the other thing is about like how much focus you put on it i mean we have an entire um like we we call them tribes at spotify but entire group an entire group called platform developer
42:53experience that is their sole remit and mission is how are we improving developer experience for all of the devs within r d at spotify and i know that those positions and functions exist in other companies whether that be platform engineering or whether or not they do have dedicated dx teams but i think it's that is that is really the key is like do you have sort of the headcount and focus because i will say that like creating your own developer portal even based off of an open source platform like backstage is not easy work there's a lot to do yeah it's not easy work there's a lot to do and you bring up platform engineering and i've been actually kind of writing a story about platform engineering um based on the discussions i'm having here and it's interesting because you can look at platform engineering in a few different ways you can look at it from like top down sure or you're looking for like for instance application engineering manager up but there's also the point of view that it's also about process and governance as much as anything so how so is it top down at spotify bottom up i think that that's the thing is like something like backstage wouldn't have come into existence were it not for the fact that like top down doesn't happen at spotify it is all about bottom up it is all about incentivizing it is all about creating the virtuous cycles that'll that allow people to do their jobs effectively but also do the right thing and that is i think way what's so special about it and why we believe particularly as a cultural change agent we feel like that's what's really cool about backstage is the plugin architecture which allows for this this marketplace of inner source contribution within your company so the company that owns within our instance of of backstage there's only about four to six engineers who manage the core deployment internally and then there's over 200 plugins that are contribute that have been contributed by over a hundred squads and that based on like them owning the domain or area of expertise so the plugin that shows you the status of current builds is owned by the team that owns build systems so the process and workflows are up to the teams individually then
45:00basically the plugins the plugins allow for people to contribute a use case to a common problem and then other teams can pick it up rather than having to reinvent the wheel so it's it kind of is these plugins that sit on top of of they can really be anything like they can be you know seeing the current status of data pipelines owned by the data team we have a learning and development team um our tech learning team that has built this incredible plugin called skill exchange which is essentially a marketplace of learning and development stuff so it's basically like your mini linkedin but you also can explore like embeds which are short-term opportunities on other teams hacks you can find hacks um start hacks and and pairing and mentoring um in addition to like coursework or things that you want to like skill develop and level up in and that's a plugin embedded into into into backstage so it's really like what do you what do you want it that your dev portal to be how do you want it to be shaped like is it this kind of centralized software catalog at the most basic level like that shows you all your services or is it going to be this thing that moves your developer culture culture forward in a bottoms up way in a contribute inner source contribution way what about the what about the pipeline though like what about like that like what about an automated pipeline that it's kind of important to have in a tool chain isn't it sure yeah and we have those i mean you're getting my my technical expertise is going to is this is where yeah this is where it's going to go yeah but i think that the we obviously have like a lot of automation built in and baked in but you still get to decide like what your database is going to be and in some you know we don't we we are a google cloud customer absolutely but we also have acquisitions that are using other clouds and so we have we have a lot of we have a lot of different opera and you if you want to be using open source technology within whatever it is that you're creating then that's available to you too so where do you go from here
47:02like what are the next steps for what you all want to do with backstage yeah so we've we've we've talked about this uh we we um shared this with the community last year so it's definitely not a spoiler but um at the spotify level i mean our goal is sort of twofold is one is to like get backstage or you know get developer portals built off of backstage into as many companies as possible like make it the de facto standard and we want that in part because we want to continue to see this open source community grow and create this more sustainable platform that everybody can kind of leverage common integrations and and and and build things that work for them and in the shape and style of what they need and then the other is that spotify we're also developing um commercial plugins because as i mentioned like we we have um 200 plus plugins internally at spotify that we've built over the five years since we developed backstage and we think that some of those are going to be very useful to backstage adopters so we're going to be offering those on a paid license basis to um to backstage adopters to plug into their backstage so there's a kind of extension of your business model isn't it it it is a little bit yeah wow wow and so you'll continue to open source projects and do because i know you have a ospo now as well we do and we you know the us offering kind of paid plugins is not a you know moving away from it's actually moving away from the open source project it's actually a way for us to sustain our investment in the open source project yeah well jen thank you so much i'm i'm i feel so enlightened by this i'm not sure of the song that i would think of that would that that would kind of like express my enlightenment but maybe is there a song about reflection that you can think about oh man oh my literally the only thing that popped into my head because i have a three-year-old is reflection from mulan okay i'm not going to sing it christina aguilera did it better yeah she did it
49:04better i won't sing it either okay thanks so much thank you okay