1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,660 Hey, everyone. This week, we've got another in the series of, I don't know, platform engineering 2 00:00:04,660 --> 00:00:08,900 talks. This one is with a couple of people from the front side who have been doing a lot of work 3 00:00:08,900 --> 00:00:13,640 around Backstage, helping large organizations customize it and integrate it with what they're 4 00:00:13,640 --> 00:00:18,480 doing. Now, before we get to it, I didn't fiddle around with my stuff enough, and I recorded off 5 00:00:18,480 --> 00:00:23,020 the microphone on my laptop. So that's why it sounds like I'm in some sort of different environment. 6 00:00:23,520 --> 00:00:27,760 But whatever, it's fine. I don't think I do too much talking in this as much as I usually do. 7 00:00:27,960 --> 00:00:32,840 So maybe it's not that big of a deal. Now, I've been collecting together a lot of stuff relevant 8 00:00:32,840 --> 00:00:38,560 to platform engineering and other things on my website. If you go to cote.io slash platform, 9 00:00:39,020 --> 00:00:42,600 you can find talks that I've done there, papers that I'm always referencing, some other things 10 00:00:42,600 --> 00:00:46,900 like that. If you find anything relevant, you should send it to me, and I'll try to put it up 11 00:00:46,900 --> 00:00:51,300 there. But that's a good place to go to check out more. And of course, you can always go to 12 00:00:51,300 --> 00:00:56,320 tanzutalk.com to find the show notes for this episode, videos that we do, all sorts of things, 13 00:00:56,320 --> 00:01:00,200 and be sure to subscribe to it. Now with that, let's get right into the interview. 14 00:01:00,200 --> 00:01:07,220 All right. Well, today, I have one of my oldest friends here, and one of his co-workers who 15 00:01:07,220 --> 00:01:13,020 recently talked at BackstageCon. Now, do you camel case that? Do you uppercase the B, 16 00:01:13,740 --> 00:01:17,080 the S, obviously the C, or do you lowercase the S? 17 00:01:18,080 --> 00:01:21,240 Lowercase the S. Yeah, lowercase the S. It's all one word. 18 00:01:21,960 --> 00:01:25,360 Like, isn't that impossible to resist, uppercasing the S? 19 00:01:26,580 --> 00:01:31,340 I think it's a matter of intonation. Like, if you're talking about, you know, you're at, 20 00:01:31,460 --> 00:01:35,060 I don't know, Pick Your Poison, you're at a Pink Floyd concert, and you're like, 21 00:01:35,120 --> 00:01:36,060 we're going to go backstage! 22 00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:38,320 Yes. 23 00:01:39,000 --> 00:01:43,460 With that one, you would capitalize the S. But if you're, you know, you're saying there's 24 00:01:43,460 --> 00:01:50,180 a lot going on backstage, then you would do that. So it's, you know, just depends on how 25 00:01:50,180 --> 00:01:55,480 you are excited you are in the moment. I suppose backstage, the software can get pretty exciting 26 00:01:55,480 --> 00:01:59,640 at times. And in that case, you'd want to camel case it. 27 00:02:01,120 --> 00:02:05,540 Our bigger issue is that we are called Frontside, our company is called Frontside, and when people 28 00:02:05,540 --> 00:02:12,860 talk about Frontside and backstage, they end up saying backside and frontstage. So there's 29 00:02:12,860 --> 00:02:14,240 that whole thing that happens. 30 00:02:15,280 --> 00:02:22,460 I have often reflected that it's sort of a delightfully ironic name for the company, 31 00:02:22,760 --> 00:02:25,180 given that you work on the backstage stuff now. 32 00:02:25,480 --> 00:02:32,580 But anyways, so why don't y'all introduce yourself? Let's go in alphabetical order. 33 00:02:34,460 --> 00:02:35,800 I guess that would be me. 34 00:02:36,220 --> 00:02:37,360 That's right. Good job. 35 00:02:38,300 --> 00:02:41,860 So, well, I think so. It depends on if we're going first name or last name. 36 00:02:43,400 --> 00:02:49,960 But, okay, my name is Charles Lowell. I'm the CTO of Frontside. Frontside actually refers 37 00:02:49,960 --> 00:02:56,440 to the experience of any particular given software. So, you experience everything from what you 38 00:02:56,440 --> 00:03:01,320 can see right in front of you. And so whether we're doing user experience or whether we're 39 00:03:01,320 --> 00:03:06,060 working on back-end systems, the way that we're going to approach it is from the front side. 40 00:03:06,060 --> 00:03:24,940 So there's the etymology of the company. And so even from that sense, it does accord with backstage and the things that we're trying to do in backstage, which is focus on the user experience, not only working with it, but what it's like to use it. 41 00:03:28,380 --> 00:03:45,300 Hi, I'm Taras Minkowski. I'm the CEO of Frontside. And Frontside, so Charles is the founder, sets the spiritual and the inspirational lighthouse for us. 42 00:03:45,820 --> 00:03:55,900 And so, but Frontside as a company, what we do is provide backstage support and we're a professional, backstage professional services partner. 43 00:03:56,800 --> 00:04:16,320 So we help companies adapt backstage. And a lot of our approaches are very much inspired by Charles's view and it's very developer experience centric and we bring a lot of that developer experience focus to the conversations around supporting backstage and growing developer portals. 44 00:04:16,320 --> 00:04:24,120 And then, and then, so, so how did, how did y'all, I mean, what, so, so walk us through, and by us, I guess, I mean, me like through like, how did, how did you end up doing this? 45 00:04:24,120 --> 00:04:29,360 Cause you know, uh, I've known Charles a long time and the front side has done all sorts of things over the years. 46 00:04:29,360 --> 00:04:35,580 So at some point y'all must've been like, we're going to do this backstage stuff. Like how, how did, how did that come about? 47 00:04:36,660 --> 00:04:49,500 Yeah. It's, we had a client who, we still have a client, we actually, we work with them that, uh, that needed to develop a developer portal and, uh, we've always been, uh, developer experience centric. 48 00:04:49,980 --> 00:05:00,020 Um, and then when we started talking to them about creating develop, uh, develop, uh, create, creating a developer portal, we were talking about a lot of things that backstage had, but I didn't even know that backstage existed. 49 00:05:00,020 --> 00:05:06,440 So someone actually within the, within the organization mentioned backstage and we looked at backstage. 50 00:05:06,440 --> 00:05:13,540 We're like, yes, we should do this because, uh, one of the biggest problems with a lot of portals is that they never get enough attention. 51 00:05:13,940 --> 00:05:23,780 Every portal is, is just enough, um, was invested, invested into it to make it work, but not enough to make it good. 52 00:05:24,480 --> 00:05:27,140 And that's the underlying problem with a lot of develop portals. 53 00:05:27,140 --> 00:05:40,140 So having essentially a framework that is available and is iterated independently, so you can then just use it to create a developer experience you want was very appealing and it's paid off. 54 00:05:42,020 --> 00:05:56,820 And, and then, so, so like, okay, I mean, you, you, you, you, you've, uh, you've hit on it there a little bit, but what, what is like with the, with the, that initial, you know, client and the ones that you have now, like what, what are they doing with backstage? 55 00:05:56,980 --> 00:06:04,660 Like what are the needs they have for, I don't know, an internal development portal beyond like a wiki page or, or whatever. 56 00:06:04,660 --> 00:06:18,420 Like, and, and, and because that, like, it's, there's a lot more going on than just like a static set of pages that one might call in the old days, knowledge management and, and like, you know, project status, things like that. 57 00:06:18,420 --> 00:06:24,420 And so like, there's something, there's something that what hasn't been satisfied that backstage is kind of filling in there. 58 00:06:24,580 --> 00:06:29,620 That's always hard for me to, as I'm doing here, talk about concisely or describe. 59 00:06:30,220 --> 00:06:44,660 Yeah, I think there is some, um, um, so if we look at the history of, of, of backstage to Spotify, like it originally emerged as a tool to help streamline certain processes and it's grown from there. 60 00:06:44,660 --> 00:06:56,780 And I think a lot of, uh, because, because, because of Spotify kind of engineering organization in their organization, it was very natural for developers to own their, like developer experience. 61 00:06:56,940 --> 00:07:14,640 So, so backstage internally, um, is a combination, I think they have something like 40 different teams contributing to backstage where each team, um, is using a kind of like putty, you know, they all add their little bits to make their, to, to add the pieces that they need. 62 00:07:14,660 --> 00:07:23,540 They need to improve their, you know, so they, they, people within Spotify, they all go to backstage to, to, uh, basically do anything. 63 00:07:23,540 --> 00:07:32,080 Like you essentially can't do, you can't get work done without going to Spotify, without going to backstage at Spotify, because everything that you need to, to be productive is there. 64 00:07:32,860 --> 00:07:36,880 Um, and, and over time from that, like there's emerged kind of patterns. 65 00:07:36,880 --> 00:07:41,240 So like the software catalog is, is a pattern that is, is now represented by plugin. 66 00:07:41,580 --> 00:07:53,440 So it's a, it's a tool that organizations can use to, um, allow developers to control metadata for, uh, different, uh, assets within their organization. 67 00:07:53,780 --> 00:08:05,260 So, and for those assets, you know, typically are like, you know, you might have a service or you might have, um, libraries or, uh, or components that are, that are, that you share across the organization. 68 00:08:05,580 --> 00:08:11,100 So develop, so the catalog gives developers control over metadata about those things. 69 00:08:11,360 --> 00:08:17,480 And from, from that metadata, you then create the actual user experience that you see in the, in the backstage portal. 70 00:08:18,240 --> 00:08:25,840 Yeah, I think it's, it's an, it's an important way to strike the proper trade-off between distribution and centralization. 71 00:08:25,840 --> 00:08:46,340 You know, I think, you know, the, the pendulum always swings in between those two poles where you have a very centralized system where, uh, of, of software development, um, and deployment, where you kind of hand things off to, to, uh, you know, your deployment team or whatever. 72 00:08:46,340 --> 00:08:48,240 That was kind of the old school way of doing it. 73 00:08:48,840 --> 00:09:02,940 And then, you know, the, the, the revolution that's been happening for a while now is giving agency to the individual developers to, to manage their own deployments and manage their own services and break things apart. 74 00:09:02,940 --> 00:09:09,480 And, and, but the problem is it can be difficult to share knowledge, uh, between those, those different things. 75 00:09:09,480 --> 00:09:20,820 So if I, if I'm an organization and I've got a hundred different services and I've got each one of those services is deployed in five different environments, you've got this fractal complexity that could emerge. 76 00:09:21,180 --> 00:09:27,080 Um, and so it's a way of kind of, as I see it, reining that in and almost inverting control. 77 00:09:27,760 --> 00:09:42,980 Uh, so what's interesting is that rather than being a portal that you maintain, the individual process, uh, the individual projects can give information about themselves and then backstage can, can pull that in. 78 00:09:42,980 --> 00:10:01,080 And so if you're familiar with the CI CD model, it would be kind of the difference between old school Jenkins and a system like circle CI or Travis, where, um, you know, in, in, uh, the, the old school CI, you kind of had a central management, uh, of, of the CI processes. 79 00:10:01,080 --> 00:10:12,120 Whereas kind of the key innovation of those distributed CI models was you provided the general infrastructure, but each product could just kind of plug in and say, this is how you build me. 80 00:10:12,380 --> 00:10:13,680 This is how you distribute me. 81 00:10:13,800 --> 00:10:17,400 And then it, it, uh, it carries away. 82 00:10:17,500 --> 00:10:20,060 So I think the inversion of control is an important aspect of it. 83 00:10:20,920 --> 00:10:30,040 So, so I, I mean, I mean, to, to, to, to crudify it, so to speak, basically like we need one UI for all the development we're doing in this organization. 84 00:10:30,280 --> 00:10:37,060 And, and, and you could call it a console, hence, hence one of my favorite words ever portal, uh, you know, the, the, the place that we go to do that. 85 00:10:37,060 --> 00:10:57,780 And the opposite of having one UI would be, uh, worst case scenario, like every single team, however, whatever a team is defined, whether it's like component or product or geography, every team basically just has like their own way of like writing up and adding the metadata about their projects. 86 00:10:58,480 --> 00:11:02,980 And, and you just have to figure that out team by team. 87 00:11:02,980 --> 00:11:03,280 Right. 88 00:11:03,560 --> 00:11:23,360 And then, and then, but then the part that, that, that, that y'all, y'all are talking about that's in there as well is, and then in addition to that, the way that, uh, each, the developers on each team, like are interacting with the whole, I don't, for lack of a better phrase, like just the software delivery process. 89 00:11:23,820 --> 00:11:27,320 There's basically a standardization of that as well, right? 90 00:11:27,320 --> 00:11:27,840 Right. 91 00:11:27,840 --> 00:11:38,020 Like in, in this kind of the same way that if you do like an inverted, like CICD pipeline, there, there is like a, there's a specification of how you're going to be doing builds. 92 00:11:38,020 --> 00:11:41,020 Now, like everyone can't just come up with their own way of doing it. 93 00:11:41,020 --> 00:11:53,020 So you really like, you're getting, you're standardizing how software is done, not, not at the, the coding level, but how you package it up and move it along towards production essentially. 94 00:11:53,020 --> 00:12:11,020 And, and everything else that's involved that yeah, it's a combination of giving developers, um, what they need to be productive at the stage that they're at, because for some, for some developers in the organization, being productive means give me a really good starting point. 95 00:12:11,020 --> 00:12:14,020 Because I don't know what are all the pieces that I need to use, right? 96 00:12:14,020 --> 00:12:21,020 So, so having a place to start, so like, um, having all of your resources aggregated in a single place. 97 00:12:21,020 --> 00:12:33,020 So when I go and look, I could find everything, but then also being able to use a, an existing template to create like a new react app or create a new service that automatically deploys, uh, using best practices on our platform. 98 00:12:33,020 --> 00:12:42,020 So for, for someone who is not familiar with the ecosystem within the organization, having a starting point is really helpful. 99 00:12:42,020 --> 00:12:54,020 But for someone who is, has a lot of experience, the flip side of that is being able to be able to adjust that, uh, uh, that experience to match their understanding. 100 00:12:54,020 --> 00:13:05,020 Like if they need something new and they want to be able to like, they already know everything that's available, but they realize that it could be better having the ability to change it will be able to contribute upstream. 101 00:13:05,020 --> 00:13:14,020 So that's the, that's the other, that's the other aspect of the developer experience using a portal that's now happening as a result of, of backstage being adopted. 102 00:13:14,020 --> 00:13:21,020 There's this inner source practice that's being cultivated where it's being built, uh, starting with a developer portal. 103 00:13:21,020 --> 00:13:22,020 Yeah. 104 00:13:22,020 --> 00:13:45,020 I mean, I mean, you're that, that, that, that, that part's interesting in, in the, the way of, uh, I don't even know what the phrases for this are, but you know, usually, uh, in, in like a large organization, you get all your enterprise architects and governance people together and they define what the, the software delivery factory or process is like, you know, we've got all these stages and these documents you have to fill out. 105 00:13:45,020 --> 00:13:57,020 So, and to some extent, like if you were to take the maximum idea of whatever it is we're talking about here, you could kind of like start to program that more than it have a, be a bunch of like word documents or Google documents or whatever. 106 00:13:57,020 --> 00:14:12,020 And, and like, so the role of whoever's specifying how software is done in an organization is more to say, uh, it's going back to your thing Charles, like here, here's like the, the execution pipeline that's going to happen. 107 00:14:12,020 --> 00:14:18,020 And here's like the little plugins that you have to add in that describe your product every year, your software. 108 00:14:18,020 --> 00:14:19,020 And then you can do whatever else. 109 00:14:19,020 --> 00:14:30,020 And then also like, because it's all actually code instead of like, you know, turning on suggest changes in some documents somewhere or going to some terrible meeting to discuss like some policy change. 110 00:14:30,020 --> 00:14:37,020 You could actually like, just like suggest some way we're going to change this and like submit a PR or whatever. 111 00:14:37,020 --> 00:14:45,020 And, and we'll get it, we'll get these people together and see if we want to just like accept that, uh, which seems better, hopefully. 112 00:14:45,020 --> 00:14:52,020 Yeah, I think it applies for every aspect of the development. 113 00:14:52,020 --> 00:15:00,020 So, you know, we were talking, um, a little bit in the green room phase about why not just use a wiki, uh, for example. 114 00:15:00,020 --> 00:15:13,020 And, you know, the, the problem is wikis have this, this issue where they end up going dead, uh, at some point because nobody's maintaining them or someone has migrated to some other technology. 115 00:15:13,020 --> 00:15:26,020 And so, you know, kind of the, the inverted, say backstage ways, let a project have control over its own documentation and then communicate whatever, whatever your organization's documentation platform is. 116 00:15:26,020 --> 00:15:36,020 Let, uh, let the project say, Hey, I'm using, you know, I'm using this markdown or I'm using TS doc, or I'm using this, this documentation tool. 117 00:15:36,020 --> 00:15:43,020 And if that changes, well, the, the project can, you know, uh, essentially update the pointer, so to speak. 118 00:15:43,020 --> 00:15:49,020 Um, and, and your portal doesn't go stale, um, because you know, you've now evolved. 119 00:15:49,020 --> 00:15:52,020 So you're not locked in to one particular technology. 120 00:15:52,020 --> 00:15:53,020 All right. 121 00:15:53,020 --> 00:15:54,020 All right. 122 00:15:54,020 --> 00:16:00,020 So now, now we had a, or at least I do have a little bit of the dream, so to speak, like, like what the point is and what happens. 123 00:16:00,020 --> 00:16:10,020 But like, so like, what is the actual, uh, if, if, if I go down to comp USA and I buy the, uh, I buy the backstage, uh, kit, like what, what am I going to get? 124 00:16:10,020 --> 00:16:13,020 Like what, what are the actual components and like the, the parts of it? 125 00:16:13,020 --> 00:16:17,020 Like, I'm pretty sure Kubernetes is involved somewhere, whether I want it to be or not. 126 00:16:17,020 --> 00:16:21,020 And then I, you know, like, what, what do I, what do I like, what do I do? 127 00:16:21,020 --> 00:16:23,020 Like, what, what's the architecture of it basically? 128 00:16:23,020 --> 00:16:25,020 What are all the parts? 129 00:16:25,020 --> 00:16:31,020 Um, so there, there are five core components that are four plugins. 130 00:16:31,020 --> 00:16:32,020 Let's call them plugins. 131 00:16:32,020 --> 00:16:37,020 There are five core plugins that are included with backstage, um, which are built on a framework. 132 00:16:37,020 --> 00:16:41,020 That is a fairly standard, like client server architecture. 133 00:16:41,020 --> 00:16:45,020 So there's a, um, there's a react application on the front end. 134 00:16:45,020 --> 00:16:52,020 And then there is, uh, node processes running in the backend, which provide the server that the client connects to. 135 00:16:52,020 --> 00:16:55,020 Um, that's the kind of the general architecture. 136 00:16:55,020 --> 00:17:03,020 Um, but with the, the five plugins that come out of the box are the catalogs as a software catalog, the scaffolder. 137 00:17:03,020 --> 00:17:12,020 So it's a, uh, a way to create templates that generate, um, generate code that is pushed into repositories. 138 00:17:12,020 --> 00:17:21,020 And then those, so that code is registered as a component in the catalog, the research, which makes it possible to find things within your ecosystem. 139 00:17:21,020 --> 00:17:33,020 Um, there is the Kubernetes plugin, which allows you to hook up your, um, if your components in the catalog represent services, those services are probably deployed to Kubernetes. 140 00:17:33,020 --> 00:17:38,020 So the Kubernetes plugin allows you to show information about the services in the catalog. 141 00:17:38,020 --> 00:17:47,020 Um, and there is, uh, I think that's four and there is, uh, what else is there? 142 00:17:47,020 --> 00:17:50,020 And then there's like, uh, Oh yeah. 143 00:17:50,020 --> 00:17:51,020 And tech docs. 144 00:17:51,020 --> 00:17:51,020 Yeah. 145 00:17:51,020 --> 00:18:00,020 So the tech docs is documentation as code where the markdown files are stored in the repository and then they're auto-generated and made visible in backstage. 146 00:18:00,020 --> 00:18:01,020 Right. 147 00:18:01,020 --> 00:18:02,020 Right. 148 00:18:02,020 --> 00:18:03,020 Right. 149 00:18:03,020 --> 00:18:04,020 Right. 150 00:18:04,020 --> 00:18:05,020 Okay. 151 00:18:05,020 --> 00:18:11,020 And, and then, so you're, you're saying like there's components and a component, does that represent like the software that a team's working on? 152 00:18:11,020 --> 00:18:13,020 Like, like, like what is a component? 153 00:18:13,020 --> 00:18:17,020 A component is, yes, there's different types of components. 154 00:18:17,020 --> 00:18:23,020 So, uh, a service, a website, a library, and then you can create your own types of components. 155 00:18:23,020 --> 00:18:24,020 Okay. 156 00:18:24,020 --> 00:18:25,020 All right. 157 00:18:25,020 --> 00:18:26,020 Yeah. 158 00:18:26,020 --> 00:18:29,020 The object model is kind of deliberately loose. 159 00:18:29,020 --> 00:18:34,020 Uh, so I think component is more, one of the, uh, better understood. 160 00:18:34,020 --> 00:18:52,020 But the other thing that's neat about it is essentially the catalog, which really underpins so much of, uh, backstage is it's, it's just a graph of things that your organization, uh, and you can kind of draw arbitrary connections between them. 161 00:18:52,020 --> 00:19:01,020 So you've got these components, but you also can have references to where these repositories house these components. 162 00:19:01,020 --> 00:19:07,020 You have, you can draw connections of which people are the contributors to these components. 163 00:19:07,020 --> 00:19:19,020 So if you have a question, uh, about a particular service, you can actually look up and you can say, ah, this person is, is, um, is associated with this. 164 00:19:19,020 --> 00:19:24,020 Now, I don't know if you actually get that out of the box, but those are the kinds of inferences that you can, you can draw. 165 00:19:24,020 --> 00:19:25,020 Um, right, right. 166 00:19:25,020 --> 00:19:26,020 Yeah. 167 00:19:26,020 --> 00:19:33,020 And, and so that, I mean, that's the other thing I was interested since, since I'll work with, with several people on this is hearing is like, it seems like. 168 00:19:33,020 --> 00:19:48,020 With my crude understanding, the, the, the, one of the original problems that the backstage was looking to solve is like, especially in the Spotify since it's like, I forget the number of some of, you know, we got like 10,000 microservices running around here. 169 00:19:48,020 --> 00:19:50,020 And what the hell is going on? 170 00:19:50,020 --> 00:19:51,020 Yeah. 171 00:19:51,020 --> 00:19:52,020 And, and, and, and yeah. 172 00:19:52,020 --> 00:19:57,020 And, and not, not only, not only what are they, how do they work, but like, who can I talk to about them? 173 00:19:57,020 --> 00:19:58,020 Like who owns this? 174 00:19:58,020 --> 00:19:59,020 Right. 175 00:19:59,020 --> 00:20:02,020 And, and then I remember like, like there was an intriguing. 176 00:20:02,020 --> 00:20:03,020 Which ones are on Kubernetes? 177 00:20:03,020 --> 00:20:04,020 Which ones are on AWS? 178 00:20:04,020 --> 00:20:05,020 Right. 179 00:20:05,020 --> 00:20:06,020 How much are they costing me? 180 00:20:06,020 --> 00:20:07,020 Yeah. 181 00:20:07,020 --> 00:20:07,020 Right. 182 00:20:07,020 --> 00:20:15,020 And so, so you have that catalog, like one, and it's more, it's, it's still kind of like just this more or less static catalog of like, here's all these different services. 183 00:20:15,020 --> 00:20:18,020 And now you at least know what they are. 184 00:20:18,020 --> 00:20:19,020 There's documentation for them. 185 00:20:19,020 --> 00:20:28,020 As you were saying, you can check in and here is a, here's, here's at least some person or an email address that owns it. 186 00:20:28,020 --> 00:20:30,020 Or like that you could talk to about it. 187 00:20:30,020 --> 00:20:31,020 I'm being a little facetious here. 188 00:20:31,020 --> 00:20:32,020 Who's here's who owns it. 189 00:20:32,020 --> 00:20:33,020 Right. 190 00:20:33,020 --> 00:20:40,020 And then I don't, I don't know what the, what the object model, as you say, is for this stuff, but then you can also add in, like, I remember one case they had that was interesting. 191 00:20:40,020 --> 00:20:44,020 That was like, well, we want to, we want to convert everyone over to Python. 192 00:20:44,020 --> 00:20:52,020 So we stuck this thing in here that basically said you need to convert to Python or you've already converted to Python or like you need to upgrade your Python version. 193 00:20:52,020 --> 00:21:06,020 And so it's almost like, I don't know which direction this injection goes, but it sounds like once you set up that, that catalog or whatever it is, you could actually start going in there and adding in like all these other little embellishments and layers of governance. 194 00:21:06,020 --> 00:21:20,020 That's probably not a word people like to use, but just to say that like, you know, this project needs to upgrade its version of Python or this one doesn't have the right kind of observability stuff built into it. 195 00:21:20,020 --> 00:21:21,020 Or, or it does. 196 00:21:21,020 --> 00:21:29,020 I, I mean, it's like, like what's that notion called where you're like, you're moving way past just like a static wiki. 197 00:21:29,020 --> 00:21:30,020 It seems like. 198 00:21:30,020 --> 00:21:35,020 Yeah, I don't, I don't know what, what it would be called. 199 00:21:35,020 --> 00:21:49,020 Um, I know there is, um, the way, the way I look at it is it's giving developers control over the shortcuts that they use to access information. 200 00:21:49,020 --> 00:22:00,020 So like when you go to the backstage catalog, um, when you find a specific component, like when you find your component on that page, you can, you can add metadata that points to external services. 201 00:22:00,020 --> 00:22:08,020 So you could say, so for example, my logs are at this URL in the Kubernetes, in, in, in Kavana. 202 00:22:08,020 --> 00:22:13,020 So when you click on the link, it will take you directly to the logs for, for that component. 203 00:22:13,020 --> 00:22:23,020 So, so, so, and then you can use that link to essentially, um, extract information for external services and then show that information on the catalog page. 204 00:22:23,020 --> 00:22:36,020 So you could say, um, now, instead of showing the, now, instead of going to Kavana, I can actually like programmatically pull information from Kavana and show those latest logs in the UI. 205 00:22:36,020 --> 00:22:52,020 So it gives you the kind of control over, um, what you're seeing on a component per component basis, because it's not unusual for two, for multiple pieces of software to, or technologies to play the same role. 206 00:22:52,020 --> 00:23:05,020 You know, so you could have like, um, you could, there might be different ways of getting, uh, different systems for viewing logs, but they could also be different, like infrastructure providers being used within the same company for hosting the same thing. 207 00:23:05,020 --> 00:23:19,020 So, like if you needed to go access, uh, for example, secrets for one component versus another, uh, it is not uncommon to see like, you know, AWS secret manager and HashiCorp bulk being used within the same company. 208 00:23:19,020 --> 00:23:26,020 So from different, depending on which component, depending on your particular component, where you access those secrets might be different. 209 00:23:26,020 --> 00:23:39,020 Um, so being able to use the catalog pages to, as a jumping point to where, what, where it is specifically for that component is really helpful for developers. 210 00:23:39,020 --> 00:23:42,020 They don't have to, so they can find what they're looking for faster. 211 00:23:42,020 --> 00:23:43,020 Yeah. 212 00:23:43,020 --> 00:23:47,020 And then, and then I suppose you could also like standardize on what's on each of those pages, right? 213 00:23:47,020 --> 00:23:58,020 Like to your point, you could say like, every time you have a, uh, a project or a component or whatever you need, you need to, it would be fantastic if you pointed to where the logs are for the current version you're running. 214 00:23:58,020 --> 00:24:03,020 And it would be great if you pointed towards wherever your issue tracker is or whatever. 215 00:24:03,020 --> 00:24:08,020 And that way you, you more standardized where all that stuff is instead of emailing around things. 216 00:24:08,020 --> 00:24:09,020 Yeah. 217 00:24:09,020 --> 00:24:16,020 And even, I think maybe the, the, the, the, the word that you're looking for, and I don't know if you mentioned it is just annotation. 218 00:24:16,020 --> 00:24:20,020 Like annotation is both a mechanic within backstage. 219 00:24:20,020 --> 00:24:24,020 Like they have this concept that you can annotate any entity in the catalog. 220 00:24:24,020 --> 00:24:35,020 Uh, but it's also kind of a abstract process of, uh, deriving metadata that's available to the rest of the system downstream from the actual components. 221 00:24:35,020 --> 00:24:50,020 So just the fact that a component is registered in the catalog and you know where it lives, you know, now your portal can actually follow that location and say, okay, you registered this component. 222 00:24:50,020 --> 00:24:56,020 I can go visit it and I can see, oh, this is, this is a Python project because it's got a PI project file. 223 00:24:56,020 --> 00:25:03,020 And I can look at it and I can see its dependencies and I can see which version of Python I think was the, the thing, the example you used. 224 00:25:03,020 --> 00:25:14,020 I could see, Hey, it's got these security vulnerabilities and these are kind of enhancements and enrichments that you can do downstream of the actual project. 225 00:25:14,020 --> 00:25:19,020 But all they had to do was kind of, uh, register themselves, uh, or be discovered. 226 00:25:19,020 --> 00:25:31,020 Um, so, so maybe I, I, it's both a mechanic and the process, this process of annotation, um, or, or the derivation of knowledge based on just the mere fact of a component existing. 227 00:25:31,020 --> 00:25:35,020 That's a mouthful that you should write that down. 228 00:25:35,020 --> 00:25:37,020 That'd be a good, uh, a good blog. 229 00:25:37,020 --> 00:25:39,020 Uh, yeah. 230 00:25:39,020 --> 00:25:47,020 So, so like, like, you know, like, like we mentioned several times, like y'all have been doing a lot of work with, with clients kind of like building up their backstage stuff and customizing it. 231 00:25:47,020 --> 00:25:55,020 And so like, you know, amalgamating that, like, if you were like, like when you do, or when you think about like sitting down with someone like, all right, we have nothing. 232 00:25:55,020 --> 00:26:03,020 Like, like, like what, uh, like what's the, like, what's like the six, 12 months sort of like thing that they do? 233 00:26:03,020 --> 00:26:05,020 Like, what's the first thing that they build out? 234 00:26:05,020 --> 00:26:13,020 What's like now it's, you know, usually it's like after three months, we proven that we should keep doing this and actually pay the front side. 235 00:26:13,020 --> 00:26:20,020 And then, and then like after that, you want to add, you want to expand to like some more teams and then maybe they want to like customize it and add some stuff. 236 00:26:20,020 --> 00:26:20,020 I don't know. 237 00:26:20,020 --> 00:26:33,020 I'm just making stuff up based on software, but like, what's kind of like, not generic in a bad way, but what's like the generic path that people go down as far as building up their, their, their backstage stuff. 238 00:26:33,020 --> 00:26:49,020 I think that the, the best starting point and hopefully companies do this, but this is not always that this is not always, um, the case, but hopefully the first step is asking their developers what it's like to be a developer at their company. 239 00:26:49,020 --> 00:26:52,020 Ask them like, what is your actual workflow? 240 00:26:52,020 --> 00:26:54,020 Like, how do you go about doing your work? 241 00:26:54,020 --> 00:27:05,020 And then what happens if you do ask what, what often happens is, um, the kind of feedback that you will get is, oh, um, it's really difficult to find stuff. 242 00:27:05,020 --> 00:27:22,020 Like, I don't know where, um, like when, when we, when we've done this for our clients, what you will hear developers say something like, I have a list of 170 links that I've maintained that I share with my friends, my colleagues at the company, because if you don't have the links, you might actually not be able to get your work done. 243 00:27:22,020 --> 00:27:29,020 Cause you don't know how, where, where the, where the, the, uh, really complicated URL is for a specific service. 244 00:27:29,020 --> 00:27:36,020 So, um, when they get feedback like that, then they can map that to something, you know, to a feature of, of, of backstage. 245 00:27:36,020 --> 00:27:43,020 And then they have, now they're starting to form their roadmap and they develop, like developers will tell you exactly what their problems are. 246 00:27:43,020 --> 00:27:52,020 It's just, I think what we're not used to is thinking about develop, like thinking about the platform as a product, thinking about it, like thinking about your internal develop platform. 247 00:27:52,020 --> 00:27:57,020 The product and thinking about like the actual, um, what, what is it like to experience the platform. 248 00:27:57,020 --> 00:28:13,020 But when you ask the question, it's actually pretty easy to map those things to features because these things that Spotify open source, the plugins of Spotify open source, those plugins, um, are solutions to very common developer problems. 249 00:28:13,020 --> 00:28:14,020 Yeah. 250 00:28:14,020 --> 00:28:15,020 Yeah. 251 00:28:15,020 --> 00:28:16,020 Yeah. 252 00:28:16,020 --> 00:28:25,020 And then, and then also like, as, as I don't know, I almost feel like as it's frequently overlooked about stuff like this, because it comes from a third party, no one gets the chance to argue it into doing nothing. 253 00:28:25,020 --> 00:28:26,020 Right. 254 00:28:26,020 --> 00:28:35,020 Like, like, like if you were coming up with your own way to build something like this in any large organization, you'd probably spend a lot of time talking about how you should do things. 255 00:28:35,020 --> 00:28:37,020 And one person would have this standard of doing it. 256 00:28:37,020 --> 00:28:39,020 Another person would have this way of doing it. 257 00:28:39,020 --> 00:28:41,020 And then maybe you would just like, forget about it. 258 00:28:41,020 --> 00:28:43,020 Cause now it's time to have vacation. 259 00:28:43,020 --> 00:28:48,020 Whereas like, if you've got a third party thing, like there's no debate about what you do. 260 00:28:48,020 --> 00:28:53,020 You just, you just start using the tool, which seems useful. 261 00:28:53,020 --> 00:29:02,020 I think the challenge with that is that I, I, what, what I'm observing in working with, with, with our clients is that there's definitely a path. 262 00:29:02,020 --> 00:29:12,020 Um, but I think what's generally missing is this concept that, that we need to be actively solving developer experience problems. 263 00:29:12,020 --> 00:29:30,020 Like there is friction and there is, um, latency in the, in the developer, in the engineering organizations, but we don't have either the tools or the, uh, we don't have the tools to observe it or to optimize it. 264 00:29:30,020 --> 00:29:50,020 So the best case in the best, um, example of this is, uh, you know, in the past we didn't have a good way to like releasing software was very, um, you know, we, we all knew that it would take months to do, but now, you know, as a result of DevOps, we have, you know, different stages for releasing software. 265 00:29:50,020 --> 00:29:56,020 So we could say, for example, our CI time is now, you know, it was taking an hour to run. 266 00:29:56,020 --> 00:29:59,020 Now we, you know, brought that down to, to seven minutes. 267 00:29:59,020 --> 00:30:09,020 So we had both the mean, by having tools that give us the way to observe, um, how long it takes, we were able to reduce that latency. 268 00:30:09,020 --> 00:30:16,020 Similar, um, doesn't get exists for developer experience, um, in other aspects. 269 00:30:16,020 --> 00:30:29,020 So, um, I think, and that's one of the challenges for a lot of companies is that it's, it's a figuring out what to improve on their platform, given where they are right now is something that people learning to do now. 270 00:30:29,020 --> 00:30:37,020 Now, now that backstage exists, it's kind of like laying out this foundation where people start thinking about how they can improve their developer experience. 271 00:30:38,020 --> 00:30:54,020 Yeah. Yeah. No, like, like again, it's something I think of in this area a lot, which is, uh, well, to put it one way, it's, it's always shocking when you discover the need for something that you thought existed already in, in, in the sense of, I mean, to use the, the old tired analogy, right? 272 00:30:54,020 --> 00:31:15,020 Like the, the cobbler's kids wear enough shoes. Right. And in this case, it's sort of like you have software developers who are by definition, writing a bunch of software and in general, collectively, they don't spend a lot of time writing software that helps the process of what they're doing. 273 00:31:15,020 --> 00:31:20,020 There's all sorts of people who write frameworks and like, I mean, that's, you almost have to stop developers from doing that. 274 00:31:20,020 --> 00:31:33,020 So they actually work on the software that runs your business, but like, but, but as far as like, what, what if we like wrote software that like makes the way that we collaborate and run better. 275 00:31:33,020 --> 00:31:58,020 And, and like we have, we have plenty of stuff that's like, you know, from the old application lifecycle management and software delivery lifecycle, like we have all sorts of tools for that, but none of it, like, I obviously can't describe it very well either, but none of it sort of is like, well, here's, well, let me, as, as you were saying in your talk at BackstageCon, it's like, yeah, but when can I have Heroku? 276 00:31:58,020 --> 00:32:13,020 Right? Like, like, like when can I have, when can I have that set of web pages that I go to that has all the same interface for finding stuff explains to me how to use it, and allows me to just work on the process, for lack of a better phrase, just collaborating with people. 277 00:32:13,020 --> 00:32:20,020 And, uh, I mean, I guess it's sort of like astonishing to think this, but like, I guess no one's done that before. 278 00:32:20,020 --> 00:32:24,020 Right? Like that, that hasn't existed. 279 00:32:24,020 --> 00:32:35,020 Yeah. I mean, I think people have tried a lot, uh, to do it individually and for themselves, but they're just certain, it's like you said, how much of your effort? 280 00:32:35,020 --> 00:32:54,020 Is it just from a business sense feasible to extend on that? Is it 10% is it 20% is it 70% and there's definitely a threshold there where you can't have a business, uh, if you're spending all of your time working on your internal developer platform. 281 00:32:54,020 --> 00:33:04,020 Uh, and so where, you know, shared solutions have to emerge in order to make it feasible for, uh, everybody to do it. 282 00:33:04,020 --> 00:33:17,020 Um, because you know, one thing is for sure, you can't there, you know, like your developer experience, it exists, whether you're observing it and where you're visible of it, not like you can't not have a developer experience. 283 00:33:17,020 --> 00:33:23,020 Um, and so if it's, you know, if you, if you can't invest in it, it's just, it's going to be bad. 284 00:33:23,020 --> 00:33:37,020 Um, and so I just, I think that, um, I think it just takes enough people acknowledging that, that it is something that needs to be solved and trying to sit down to do the work to solve it collectively. 285 00:33:37,020 --> 00:33:42,020 I just, it's one of those things where it's very difficult for it to be emergent in a single place. 286 00:33:44,020 --> 00:33:52,020 I think it also couldn't have been emergent because, um, it was almost impractical to have it emergent previously because there's nothing you can do about it. 287 00:33:52,020 --> 00:34:11,020 Like before, before cloud native, before companies start to build internal developed platforms, when you're relying on, on third-party software that you do not control, when you're relying on monoliths that you cannot easily change, you can't really do much about like, even if you wanted to change, you don't have any means to do it. 288 00:34:11,020 --> 00:34:21,020 And then I think what's happened with cloud native is that by giving you the, the granular pieces that you can use to assemble your internal developed platform, you now have control over the individual pieces. 289 00:34:21,020 --> 00:34:24,020 So now you can, you actually have something that you can manipulate. 290 00:34:24,020 --> 00:34:31,020 And then what's happened as a result is now people realize, okay, well, I have an internal developed platform that consists of a whole bunch of tools. 291 00:34:31,020 --> 00:34:35,020 But what's, what we're finding is that it's actually really difficult for developers to be productive. 292 00:34:35,020 --> 00:34:48,020 And so now there is a, um, you can attach a monetary value to not having solved this problem, like not having, not, not thinking about a developer experience actually has a cost. 293 00:34:48,020 --> 00:35:00,020 And this is what we're seeing now, I think what's changed in the last like five years is that companies are actually realizing that it's really expensive for them to not think about the developer experience on the internal developed platforms. 294 00:35:00,020 --> 00:35:06,020 And so now they're thinking, now they're standing up teams that are dedicated to, um, to use, to improve that. 295 00:35:06,020 --> 00:35:18,020 And I think what's happening with backstage is it's emerged as a, as a, at the right time, you know, we went from, you know, a few years ago, it had 50 adopters a year ago, it had 125 now has 400 adopters. 296 00:35:18,020 --> 00:35:32,020 Um, and it's being adopted really quickly because it is a well, like well understood, the, the need is well understood, but the solution might not be, you know, but that's something that we're collectively learning. 297 00:35:32,020 --> 00:35:34,020 But the problem is now known. 298 00:35:35,020 --> 00:35:47,020 So, so then how about like, like two, two more things to go before we close out one is, uh, so, so I, I, I got all excited and drove us off the track of like the, uh, the kind of like, you know, 299 00:35:47,020 --> 00:35:49,020 the build out that people have, right. 300 00:35:49,020 --> 00:35:53,020 And we stopped around, uh, uh, just discoverability, right? 301 00:35:53,020 --> 00:36:00,020 Like, like having, having that your, your, your, your, your magic cheat sheet of like all the funny URLs you need to go to, to find the work to do. 302 00:36:00,020 --> 00:36:07,020 Like what, so once you establish like the, the catalog, if you will, you can discover things and find them. 303 00:36:07,020 --> 00:36:09,020 Like what are the next things that people start working on? 304 00:36:09,020 --> 00:36:16,020 Like what are the more kind of advanced stuff that people build in that I imagine, you know, y'all get hired to help out with a little bit. 305 00:36:16,020 --> 00:36:32,020 Um, I mean, you do, uh, I would say the, you know, you, it really depends on where, what, what aspect of that network of information is the most valuable to you. 306 00:36:32,020 --> 00:36:46,020 Um, so, you know, at the, at, at its core, what you're constructing is a graph of the internal software ecosystem and all constituents. 307 00:36:46,020 --> 00:36:55,020 And so, you know, what aspect of that graph is you want to surface, I think is where people focus on next. 308 00:36:55,020 --> 00:36:56,020 Now that's the abstract answer. 309 00:36:56,020 --> 00:37:01,020 I would say, uh, surfacing the people associated with software. 310 00:37:01,020 --> 00:37:05,020 Um, we've seen be something that's an extremely high value target. 311 00:37:05,020 --> 00:37:08,020 Um, I don't know if you wanted to add something to that. 312 00:37:08,020 --> 00:37:20,020 Yeah, it's, it's very much, it very much differs for each company because each company is going to have a different, like their, their platform is going to be more complete in other areas. 313 00:37:20,020 --> 00:37:30,020 And we can, uh, in, uh, in some, so the most standard thing that we see happening is, uh, creating templates that you can use to scaffold new components. 314 00:37:30,020 --> 00:37:33,020 So starting to standardize and make it easier for developers to create things. 315 00:37:33,020 --> 00:37:41,020 Um, but depending, so that, that, that, that, that's a pretty common one as a kind of a next step. 316 00:37:41,020 --> 00:37:51,020 Um, but what specific, what, what information you surface in the catalog very much depends on your, your biggest needs. 317 00:37:51,020 --> 00:37:52,020 Like what are the biggest problems? 318 00:37:52,020 --> 00:37:57,020 Cause at some companies, they might have, um, a service built out. 319 00:37:57,020 --> 00:38:04,020 Like it's not uncommon for us to see like some clients have an entity service that provides information about all the different things. 320 00:38:04,020 --> 00:38:06,020 So like they might already have a catalog. 321 00:38:06,020 --> 00:38:16,020 So for them to pull the information from the existing catalog and to surface it in backstage, it's just a matter of like integrating with their, with their service, uh, with the existing service catalog. 322 00:38:16,020 --> 00:38:26,020 Um, or another company might have a system for, uh, querying relationships between services. 323 00:38:26,020 --> 00:38:29,020 So for them, it might be, okay, make that information available in backstage. 324 00:38:29,020 --> 00:38:31,020 So you can represent the structure. 325 00:38:31,020 --> 00:38:35,020 So you could, so there's in a, in backstage, there's a concept of systems and domains. 326 00:38:35,020 --> 00:38:38,020 It's kind of organization of, of different information. 327 00:38:38,020 --> 00:38:46,020 So you might use, um, you might use backstage to represent the relationships between different systems within, within your organization. 328 00:38:46,020 --> 00:38:47,020 Right. 329 00:38:47,020 --> 00:38:52,020 And then going one level deeper, it'd be like, okay, showing how those things depend on each other. 330 00:38:52,020 --> 00:39:01,020 So like, you know, if a service uses another service and depending on what you have, depending on what you already have, like your approach to that problem or what your needs are going to be different. 331 00:39:01,020 --> 00:39:05,020 And so you kind of have to prioritize based on where your biggest pain points are. 332 00:39:05,020 --> 00:39:06,020 Right. 333 00:39:06,020 --> 00:39:16,020 So you could generate the, uh, that old infamous, like Netflix death star Mondrian thing, you know, they used to have, that was like, here's, here's, uh, how all of our microservices connect together. 334 00:39:16,020 --> 00:39:17,020 And, uh, isn't that great. 335 00:39:17,020 --> 00:39:22,020 But I mean, you know, that, that would be useful to see the, uh, the graph of all your stuff. 336 00:39:22,020 --> 00:39:28,020 And, you know, if you have like thousands and thousands of applications and services that that's hard to track down. 337 00:39:28,020 --> 00:39:44,020 So, so then like kind of connected to that, like, so where, at, at, at, at, at what point does like the, the intentions of what backstage want to do, like kind of crossover scope creep. 338 00:39:44,020 --> 00:39:54,020 Like if I were to say, so let's take like your, your, your monitoring stuff and we're just going to move that all into backstage rather than being in your monitoring tool. 339 00:39:54,020 --> 00:39:56,020 Like that doesn't seem. 340 00:39:57,020 --> 00:39:58,020 Right. 341 00:39:58,020 --> 00:40:01,020 Like against the philosophy of. 342 00:40:01,020 --> 00:40:02,020 Right. 343 00:40:02,020 --> 00:40:03,020 No, no. 344 00:40:03,020 --> 00:40:04,020 Exactly. 345 00:40:04,020 --> 00:40:10,020 And so like, where, where's that edge of like, here's something we could do that, that we need done. 346 00:40:10,020 --> 00:40:13,020 And like, it doesn't belong over here in backstage land. 347 00:40:13,020 --> 00:40:16,020 That's not like in, I mean, it's just programming. 348 00:40:16,020 --> 00:40:18,020 So we could put whatever you want on a screen. 349 00:40:18,020 --> 00:40:21,020 And like, when you click a button, it could do whatever you want. 350 00:40:21,020 --> 00:40:24,020 But like, that doesn't make sense to have it here. 351 00:40:24,020 --> 00:40:25,020 It's not part of it. 352 00:40:25,020 --> 00:40:36,020 Like, uh, well, here's another one is like, so would you use backstage to like, to all of the human part of lease management? 353 00:40:36,020 --> 00:40:45,020 Or would you not like, like, like, is that the UI you would use to release your software all the way to production? 354 00:40:45,020 --> 00:40:48,020 Or would that be scope creep and you wouldn't do that? 355 00:40:48,020 --> 00:40:53,020 It could be if you're, if you're, if that process touches multiple systems. 356 00:40:53,020 --> 00:41:03,020 Some place you need to touch multiple systems, like from developer experience perspective, like you need to, I think this is where backstage shines is showing information from multiple systems. 357 00:41:03,020 --> 00:41:16,020 If you want to go, if you need to get deeper into that, into like, you don't want to hide the system that you're integrating with because it might have really useful information that you need at a specific time. 358 00:41:16,020 --> 00:41:20,020 So developers need to go to jump to that system and find what they're looking for. 359 00:41:20,020 --> 00:41:25,020 So, uh, so you don't want to, I don't think it's appropriate to bring everything into backstage. 360 00:41:25,020 --> 00:41:33,020 Um, but in the way that the systems overlap backstage might be the only place where this is actually possible. 361 00:41:33,020 --> 00:41:34,020 Right, right. 362 00:41:34,020 --> 00:41:44,020 That's, that's a good guideline that if, if you're trying to integrate together multiple systems to do something integrates the wrong word. 363 00:41:44,020 --> 00:41:51,020 But if you have to use multiple systems to accomplish some task, it's at least good to consider doing something. 364 00:41:51,020 --> 00:41:52,020 Right. 365 00:41:52,020 --> 00:41:59,020 I mean, I think that backstage is definitely not designed to unwind the progress of distributing stuff in microservices. 366 00:41:59,020 --> 00:42:01,020 It's to make it more powerful. 367 00:42:01,020 --> 00:42:12,020 So it doesn't do, I mean, it does a lot, but it's, it's not, uh, it's, it's not designed to do, uh, particular tasks so much as aggregate information. 368 00:42:12,020 --> 00:42:14,020 About what is being done. 369 00:42:14,020 --> 00:42:15,020 Right. 370 00:42:15,020 --> 00:42:16,020 To be a portal. 371 00:42:16,020 --> 00:42:17,020 Which, which I guess. 372 00:42:17,020 --> 00:42:22,020 Did we have avoided that word the entire, uh, the entire time? 373 00:42:22,020 --> 00:42:30,020 No, I mean, you know, uh, I, I was, I was, uh, I was raised in the late nineties and early two thousands when portal first came about. 374 00:42:30,020 --> 00:42:33,020 So I have, I have weird feelings about the word portal. 375 00:42:33,020 --> 00:42:34,020 You even had a site called portal potty. 376 00:42:34,020 --> 00:42:35,020 Yes. 377 00:42:35,020 --> 00:42:37,020 Like, I don't know if you still hold onto that domain. 378 00:42:37,020 --> 00:42:38,020 Like, I, I don't know. 379 00:42:38,020 --> 00:42:40,020 I mean, I, I don't, do people use the word portlet? 380 00:42:40,020 --> 00:42:41,020 That, that would be great. 381 00:42:41,020 --> 00:42:43,020 If that, if that reemerged. 382 00:42:43,020 --> 00:42:47,020 I never knew they emerged in the first place. 383 00:42:47,020 --> 00:42:48,020 Yeah. 384 00:42:48,020 --> 00:42:49,020 Portlet is scope. 385 00:42:49,020 --> 00:42:55,020 It's just like the same way that you always have a sitcom that's about 20 years in the past. 386 00:42:55,020 --> 00:43:04,020 So, you know, at any, uh, at any given moment, there's going to be a sitcom that takes place 20 years ago. 387 00:43:04,020 --> 00:43:06,020 Same thing with the vocabulary and tech. 388 00:43:06,020 --> 00:43:07,020 Yeah. 389 00:43:07,020 --> 00:43:08,020 There's some law. 390 00:43:08,020 --> 00:43:09,020 Yeah. 391 00:43:09,020 --> 00:43:10,020 Well, great. 392 00:43:10,020 --> 00:43:11,020 Well, that's been good. 393 00:43:11,020 --> 00:43:15,020 See, I always just use these to educate myself and ask the questions I'm confused about. 394 00:43:15,020 --> 00:43:17,020 And I think I'm a little more cleared up and smarter. 395 00:43:17,020 --> 00:43:18,020 I don't know. 396 00:43:18,020 --> 00:43:19,020 We'll see. 397 00:43:19,020 --> 00:43:24,020 But is there, is there anything, uh, is there anything you're thinking of that maybe we've left out to kind of defining, 398 00:43:24,020 --> 00:43:31,020 like, like, like, you know, what I want to do here is like define, like what backstage is beyond like, you know, a portal. 399 00:43:31,020 --> 00:43:37,020 And then like how people like, like the immediate gain that you would get. 400 00:43:37,020 --> 00:43:38,020 Right. 401 00:43:38,020 --> 00:43:39,020 Which, which, which y'all went over. 402 00:43:39,020 --> 00:43:46,020 Well, it's like, well, it's really hard to just find stuff, which sounds like a trivial problem, but it's very important. 403 00:43:47,020 --> 00:43:53,020 And, and then, and then, you know, there, there's basically the, the kind of like what the stack looks like from a very high level. 404 00:43:53,020 --> 00:43:58,020 But, uh, I don't know what, what, what, what do you think is going to be happening over the next year or so in this area? 405 00:43:58,020 --> 00:44:00,020 Like what, uh, what is the community talking about? 406 00:44:00,020 --> 00:44:02,020 As far as like, here's what we need to do now. 407 00:44:02,020 --> 00:44:05,020 Like, this is the next thing we need to work on. 408 00:44:06,020 --> 00:44:25,020 I think the biggest, the, the, the most important thing that's going to happen now is going to be, um, making it easier for, to engage, for people to get engaged with backstage or for the users of backstage to be engaged with backstage in a way that is, that is easy for them. 409 00:44:25,020 --> 00:44:37,020 So, because right now it's the, the process of building a port, the portal is, is a little bit, um, like it follows a typical, like, you know, you, you, you have a source code, you build it, you build a Docker image and you push it. 410 00:44:37,020 --> 00:44:51,020 So, so it has that entire, it has that, um, process built into the, into develop development, which means that if, if someone, you know, if someone is using backstage and they want to add, let's say like, oh, I want for our project. 411 00:44:51,020 --> 00:45:03,020 We use, um, uh, like a, it's a SAS for doing, for doing logging or forgetting, uh, getting error logging from like a client application. 412 00:45:03,020 --> 00:45:04,020 Like I would like to integrate that. 413 00:45:04,020 --> 00:45:14,020 So what they would need to do is they need to clone the repo at the, at that integration as like a, as a react component or, you know, as an, or node process. 414 00:45:14,020 --> 00:45:19,020 And then create a pull request, it's going to get merged and it's going to get redeployed and it's going to be running. 415 00:45:19,020 --> 00:45:22,020 So that whole process takes a lot of, a lot of work. 416 00:45:22,020 --> 00:45:34,020 So I think what's going to happen over the next, over this year is try to find, increase the number of things that people, that teams can do without having to go through that whole cycle. 417 00:45:34,020 --> 00:45:35,020 Right. 418 00:45:35,020 --> 00:45:36,020 Right. 419 00:45:36,020 --> 00:45:37,020 Yeah. 420 00:45:37,020 --> 00:45:42,020 That makes, I mean, basically just making it more usable for developers to add things. 421 00:45:42,020 --> 00:45:43,020 Exactly. 422 00:45:43,020 --> 00:45:44,020 Yeah. 423 00:45:44,020 --> 00:45:45,020 Of their experiences. 424 00:45:45,020 --> 00:45:47,020 So they don't have to use react or TypeScript. 425 00:45:47,020 --> 00:45:59,020 They could just use, they could just use the UI to add the things that they need and be able to amend the, like modify their experience based, modify their like backstage experience based on. 426 00:45:59,020 --> 00:46:03,020 Uh, their needs without having to, without having to go through a build cycle. 427 00:46:03,020 --> 00:46:04,020 Yeah. 428 00:46:04,020 --> 00:46:15,020 Well, hopefully it won't reduce on the typical, I mean, it seems like the cycle, whatever the format is, is you do the, uh, the current configuration format squared where the first phase is to write another layer. 429 00:46:15,020 --> 00:46:20,520 days in our contemporary era let's simplify the yaml on top of the yaml and uh just just make that 430 00:46:20,520 --> 00:46:26,000 easier to configure stuff which always seems i don't know maybe maybe i'm i'm too snarky but 431 00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:29,520 that seems a little silly that you're going to simplify something by adding more of the thing on 432 00:46:29,520 --> 00:46:34,620 it instead of just simplifying the original thing but i don't know i just make slides i don't know 433 00:46:34,620 --> 00:46:40,640 anything anymore yeah and then also i mean you entered like you brought it up several times it 434 00:46:40,640 --> 00:46:46,220 i forget what you call this kind of thing but it seems like like one way of figuring out where to 435 00:46:46,220 --> 00:46:51,280 get started in addition to asking developers as you're saying is like it's sort of like a little 436 00:46:51,280 --> 00:46:58,880 illustrative uh thing to say like all right tell me how you find the logs it's always logs like to 437 00:46:58,880 --> 00:47:03,640 kind of make a point about how to organize stuff it's just like like how long does it take you just 438 00:47:03,640 --> 00:47:08,760 to find the most recent logs and then like you know that's that's a good use case to go out and solve 439 00:47:08,760 --> 00:47:13,420 really quickly and then how do you find the logs for all the applications like how long would it 440 00:47:13,420 --> 00:47:18,100 take you to actually get those logs so you can start looking at them never mind the thrill of 441 00:47:18,100 --> 00:47:23,180 right through a bunch of logs just finding right always seems like a uh something to test out as 442 00:47:23,180 --> 00:47:30,800 far as how your internal portaling for developers is working out well great well thanks but so if 443 00:47:30,800 --> 00:47:36,640 people are interested in more of y'all what would you point in that give us a call to action call to 444 00:47:36,640 --> 00:47:43,980 action we can go to frontside.com slash backstage and we also have uh we we offer enterprise 445 00:47:43,980 --> 00:47:47,800 backstage support i don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that for us but i know we have 446 00:47:47,800 --> 00:47:55,240 uh plans that are built to accommodate people wherever they are in their backstage journey uh whether 447 00:47:55,240 --> 00:48:00,920 yeah what what does that business look like like i mean y'all are also like some of the early 448 00:48:00,920 --> 00:48:07,380 people figuring out what the the market in this area looks like like what what do uh what have you 449 00:48:07,380 --> 00:48:13,700 discovered you can get paid for so far yeah i think one of the so right now what that support looks like 450 00:48:13,700 --> 00:48:20,220 is um helping teams that are adopting backstage uh be productive which is essentially giving them the 451 00:48:20,260 --> 00:48:27,640 information they need when they need it um and um and we have because there are teams that are being 452 00:48:27,640 --> 00:48:32,920 stood up specifically for building this but learning all the tools that are necessary to be to to be able 453 00:48:32,920 --> 00:48:38,460 to create a backstage portal is not easy so we make it easier for them and then uh another part of that 454 00:48:38,460 --> 00:48:43,680 is uh when backstage doesn't do exactly what they need we as part of the service we actually go and work 455 00:48:43,680 --> 00:48:49,440 upstream to make those changes for them on behalf of the team so they can then just upgrade um and get 456 00:48:49,440 --> 00:48:54,000 the latest version without having to fork their instance of backstage so they can keep staying like 457 00:48:54,000 --> 00:49:01,000 current and be able to upgrade at any time um and uh i think the third thing is uh also navigating 458 00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:05,440 like how do you actually accomplish something from product management perspective because if you have 459 00:49:05,440 --> 00:49:10,380 uh you you know you have a problem there are a variety of different ways of solving it 460 00:49:10,380 --> 00:49:15,380 and so knowing which solution to apply i mean this is one of the benefits that we have in our particular 461 00:49:15,380 --> 00:49:21,200 positioning because we work with with adopters and we and we look like we see their roadmaps we see 462 00:49:21,200 --> 00:49:28,540 how they solve problems we help them design solutions we have right now um we support development of 463 00:49:28,540 --> 00:49:35,960 portals with over a hundred thousand users combined um so we have a quite a varied perspective on who 464 00:49:35,960 --> 00:49:42,460 on how these portals are implemented so uh we we make that information like we make them 465 00:49:42,460 --> 00:49:49,120 the information the product managers need to design their roadmaps roadmaps for developer experience 466 00:49:49,120 --> 00:49:53,220 kind of available to them what they need it so that's kind of like without what would that kind of how 467 00:49:53,220 --> 00:49:58,860 that work you you can you can i mean when you have when you have well not not even that scale when 468 00:49:58,860 --> 00:50:02,800 you have like just even a small scale of different organizations doing something like this 469 00:50:02,800 --> 00:50:09,240 you can uh you can speed up people's product management thinking right because they you know 470 00:50:09,240 --> 00:50:15,620 because that way they're not the first they don't what it's rarely the case that someone is the first 471 00:50:15,620 --> 00:50:20,400 person who's encountered this problem and there's usually other people who solve it and they don't 472 00:50:20,400 --> 00:50:25,380 have to like reinvent the solution over and over again it's the old like you know on on the uh 473 00:50:25,380 --> 00:50:30,400 especially in the enterprise software space uh us us on the sell side are always joking like yeah 474 00:50:30,400 --> 00:50:35,160 everyone thinks they have special problems and i just talked to three people this morning who had 475 00:50:35,160 --> 00:50:40,880 that same exact special problem and like you have to you can help people out understand that health 476 00:50:40,880 --> 00:50:47,540 is available and their problems are not uh detrimentally unique and special for them which is one thing 477 00:50:47,540 --> 00:50:52,040 yeah one thing that's really common to a lot of our company a lot of our customers is that 478 00:50:52,040 --> 00:50:59,660 um they look to spotify for for inspiration but spotify is a very advanced engineer organization 479 00:50:59,660 --> 00:51:04,420 like they created backstage because they're very advanced engineering organization so the practices 480 00:51:04,420 --> 00:51:09,460 that spot spotify has they're kind of like the end goal where everybody wants to end up 481 00:51:09,460 --> 00:51:16,860 but it's really difficult to implement the end goal when you're like if you're like here on the left side 482 00:51:16,860 --> 00:51:22,940 trying to move up to the right side where you where you want to be acting like you are already arrived 483 00:51:22,940 --> 00:51:27,380 there it doesn't really work you know so because if you're you you don't you're not not in the same 484 00:51:27,380 --> 00:51:34,540 place like spotify has 40 teams already contributing to backstage if you have no teams contribute to 485 00:51:34,540 --> 00:51:38,360 backstage the way you're going to solve problems is going to be different and this is what this is 486 00:51:38,360 --> 00:51:43,540 what a lot of our work is helping them uh like think about how to solve problems at their particular 487 00:51:43,540 --> 00:51:49,080 place as opposed to how spotify would solve it because it's just a different way of like you you 488 00:51:49,080 --> 00:51:55,820 act differently depending on where you are in your journey yeah yeah for sure it's uh it'd be a bad 489 00:51:55,820 --> 00:51:58,640 idea to learn how to drive stick in like a formula one race 490 00:51:58,640 --> 00:52:06,860 that's exactly what it is yeah all right well great well thanks for being on and uh you know 491 00:52:06,860 --> 00:52:10,360 see everyone next time bye all right thank you