From Spotify to Open Source: The Backstory of Backstage - OpenObservability Talks S3E12 OpenObservability Talks

With over 1,000 companies using it and 21.5K+ stars on GitHub, the Backstage open source project is quickly becoming a go-to tool for managing developer infrastructure. In this episode, I’ll sit down with Lee Mills, a Senior Engineering Manager from Spotify's Backstage project, to learn more about how the open source platform is revolutionizing the developer experience and how it aligns with the growing Internal Developer Platform (IDP) space. We’ll discuss the need that drove Spotify to build this internal tool, about the decision and journey to open source it and donate it to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). We’ll also discuss the new commercial plugins, what’s coming up on the roadmap, and much more. 

Lee has worked as an engineering manager for the past 12 years, from Amazon to Spotify and everything in between. Prior to that Lee had a mixed background working in academia as a lecturer, worked as a Boom Op for television in the UK and lived in more places than he can count.

The episode was live-streamed on 17 May 2023 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/W3c4YJ71BOQ

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Show Notes:

01:44 Spotify Engineering internal need for Backstage

07:09 Backstage and Platform Engineering

10:33 Backstage components: Templates, Catalogue and Plugins

15:31 Why Spotify open-sourced Backstage

21:45 from Spotify’s internal Hack Week to a viral growth

25:19 a perfect community contributed feature in 24 hours

28:48 new Backstages use cases for Banking and healthcare

30:54 Spotify released commercial plugins for Backstage

36:51 How to follow Backstage discussion and Lee Mills

39:08 KubeCon Europe updates

40:51 Prometheus remote-write is standardized

41:32 Sunsetting OpenCensus

42:31 ECS to merge with OpenTelemetry specification

43:22 progress to stabilize Logs in OpenTelemetry

45:02 MicroProfile v6.0 support OpenTelemetry Traces

45:40 Grafana 9.5 release



Resources:

Backstage website: https://backstage.io 

Kubecon Europe 2023 talk: The State of Backstage in 2023: https://youtu.be/vskefrlvocE 

Kubecon Europe 2023 talk: Lunar building an internal compliance platform using Backstage: https://youtu.be/6T3Mf6pdg7E

Backstage accepted as CNCF incubation project: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2022/03/15/backstage-project-joins-the-cncf-incubator/



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Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Lee Mills
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codetoy
Mastodon: @leem@mastodon.social