All Your Tools in One Toy Basket: Backstage’s Past, Present, and Future With Avantika Iyer

Transcript

Daniel Afonso (00:09): Welcome to Page It to the Limit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to run software and production successfully. We cover leading practices using software and industry to improve both systems, reliability and the lives of people supporting those systems. I’m your host Daniel Afonso, and you can find me on X, LinkedIn and Bluesky at danieljcafonso. Okay. Okay, everyone, welcome [00:00:30] to another episode of Page It To The Limit. We are here today to follow up with it on some acquaintances that we made during the PagerDuty on Tour London. So I would like to ask my guests to introduce themselves and tell me about what you do, what are some things you’re passionate about? Just give us a quick intro.

Avantika Iyer (00:52): Sure. Hey, really nice to be back here and talking to you. My name’s Tika. Well, it’s actually Avantika Iyer, [00:01:00] but yeah, everyone, all my friends call me Tika, whether it’s work or in personal life. I very recently actually became an engineering manager, so I would call myself an engineering manager now, but I’ve worked as a software engineer for about 11 years, maybe more, actually it’s been so long ago since I’ve been coding. I can’t even remember when I first started, but it’s been ages as I work at Spotify. I work specifically [00:01:30] in Backstage at Spotify, joined Spotify about two years ago and yeah, it’s always been backstage since I began and there’s been so much going on since I started. So what am I passionate about? I think my favorite part of being in engineering is probably critical thinking and problem solving, whether it’s for developers or for customers. I’m also incredibly passionate about user [00:02:00] experience, shipping products with really good user experience that customers or users really enjoy to be on that platform. So that’s kind of what I like to deliver. Yeah, I think that would be it.

Daniel Afonso (02:13): Okay. Yeah, that’s a great introduction. Thank you so much. So you touched on one of the points. That’s what brought us here today, which is talking a bit about Backstage because during PagerDuty on Tour we got to meet each other backstage and Spotify. There was a booth there where you got to talk about [00:02:30] Backstage to everyone attending. And so yeah, that’s a bit of where we’ll be focusing our conversation. I have a first question for you because before we jump into what Backstage is, if you could tell me how did Backstage come up to be and what is the value that you see that it brings to developers? It would be amazing.

Avantika Iyer (02:51): Yeah. Ages ago, actually five years ago, we decided [00:03:00] to open source Backstage. So before that, backstage is an internal developer portal that we kind of built within Spotify for all of our engineers or pretty much any employee. It’s not just for engineers a bit more than that, but mostly it’s the developers within the company that find the most value out of it. When it was working really great for us internally as a platform, there was a little bit of thinking around, okay, what should we do with it now because it’s [00:03:30] been working so great, maybe other people can kind of test it out, see if it works for them, and we can get a little bit of feedback from the community as well. We also wanted to get involved in Open Source, so that’s where the decision happened to kind of open source it and imagine if you could have more than just a limited number of people coming up with ideas and Chip in features into Backstage, and you have the support of an entire community, [00:04:00] and we knew the solution worked really great for us, so other tech companies out there with similar needs would definitely be able to find value in it.

(04:06): And that’s kind of where it started. And we call this shipping our expertise. There’s lots of things that we develop internally in Spotify that no the tech community can really benefit from. And so our way of contributing to the community itself and giving them back some of the things that we’ve built internally is under the umbrella of shipping our expertise basically. And [00:04:30] that’s pretty much everything that we built in that works great and we want to share with the community, we end up doing it and Backstage was one of those products.

Daniel Afonso (04:39): Okay, yeah, that’s really great. I really love when companies take this route because then it’s like you mentioned, you start getting this value out of the entire world and you as a company grow, but the community gets closer to it and I think we have been seeing backstage growing and growing since it was open sourced. If I [00:05:00] could just jump a bit into what does Backstage do? Could we just get a one minute or two minutes? It depends on how long you want to take. Explaining a bit on what does an internal developer portal do? What’s the value that it brings to people?

Avantika Iyer (05:19): So imagine your day as an engineer, obviously in any, and you probably worked across multiple different companies where few engineers actually work at a single organization [00:05:30] at a time, and every organization is going to have its own tech stack. So starting with let’s say the source control that you use, the cloud infrastructure that you use, the CI ICD pipeline that you use or the tooling that you use for AB testing or experimentation. All of these contracts or maybe even project management, we use Jira and some other companies maybe use something else. And there’s so many different solutions out there and obviously there’s business execs like High up above, you are deciding these contracts, but day-to-day [00:06:00] as an engineer, when you log into your computer, you’ve got to have your browser open with a bunch of different tabs of all of these different areas of Tech Stack that you need to dive into.

(06:10): So maybe today there’s an incident going on and I’m looking at my PagerDuty, I’m looking at the dashboard, I’m trying to look at my GCS logs to try and debug an issue, and this is probably part of my workflow, logging into all of these different tools. Now imagine if you were able to come to a singular portal [00:06:30] in which let’s say there was a specific service that was impacted, you could kind of just hit that service and when you go to that service, you get this big picture of, okay, if you were trying to debug issues and look at incidents, you’ve got a link to that PagerDuty incident. You’ve got a link to where you would have to go see the service logs or link to all of the monitoring dashboards and so on and so forth. But you kind of get all of that within the context of the service [00:07:00] that you’re trying to resolve the incident on that would be really great.

(07:05): Otherwise as an engineer, when you first, let’s say you’re coming into a team and you don’t really know where everything is, what G CCP project you need to toggle to go and take a look at this stuff. So you to over time, you would have to build that muscle kind of learning that knowledge. But with Backstage, what you can do is you can kind of drill down to that single context that you’re looking for and then find all of the [00:07:30] answers in a single location. So that’s a very unique case of internal developer portal that I’m describing to you. But it’s essentially this large, it started with a software catalog, like a catalog of software or services or websites and stuff that you own as a team or as an organization, being able to view it in a single place. And then based [00:08:00] on the component that you select, you get to see all of its relations, whether, and that’s what I’m saying, any other services that it kind of speaks to or it depends upon.

(08:12): And then being able to hit any of those points in the tech stack that will help you essentially work on that service. So that’s kind of how that started. But it kind went from being just that a single service catalog sort of view to a lot, lot more. That’s also where all of the documentation [00:08:30] about your components are centralized and these documents are linked to the services as well. Besides that, you’ve got an ability. So Backstage is also this unique system of plugins, and when I say plugins, I mean your documentation is a sort of a plugin. PagerDuty could be a plugin that you could add to your backstage instance that directly links to the incidents that are associated with that service. You could also [00:09:00] have links to, we have a plugin here at Spotify that we use internally, which is called Soundcheck through which we kind of set up standardization for all of our components.

(09:12): So it’s sort of like a tech health thing, so a checklist of things that you expect all of your components to meet so that they are shipped with a golden standard. We also have a plugin that’s for R-C-I-C-D. So we have an internal CI tool called Tingle [00:09:30] that we created a plugin for and we hosted within our backstage system. So let’s say externally we’ve got, if you go to the open source community, you’ll find a plugin called GitHub actions, which you can add to your instance and you’ll get this view of all of the GitHub actions that exist for your component. So all of these are different plugins that can be integrated into your backstage system and they all relate to your software component that you own. And when you log into this IDP, everything is based on [00:10:00] what you own. So depending on the level of role that you are at.

(10:03): So now me as an engineering manager, I can see everything that my squad owns, but let’s say our studio lead, like someone who kind manages a whole list of squads, they would be able to see everything across all of the squads and be able to use the plugins around that surface area, which is a much broader surface area compared to what iTouch day-to-day as an engineering manager of a squad. [00:10:30] So the IDP is kind of developed in a way where it’s kind of, how do you say it’s from the context of the user that’s logged in, and so it kind shows you data that is relevant to you. And all of that is available pretty much through one click and it’s what we call the single pane of glass for everything that you would need to do day to day.

Daniel Afonso (10:51): Okay, yeah, that’s really, really good. Following up on that. And by the way, I really love how you explained the plugins [00:11:00] integration and the overview from the perspective of each user. I think that’s really interesting. And now thinking about it, I’m very, very recent to this world as well as I’ve joined PagerDuty six months, seven months ago as we are recording these episodes and I’ve been learning a bit more about Backstage Show. It’s been really exciting as well to seeing all these integrations, all these plugins, all the things that we can do. Even last week we were at KubeCon talking about rundeck. [00:11:30] Rundeck is one of the things that we also have that has integrations with Backstage, which is really exciting. But talking about still on this topic, I want to would like to know what’s in the future for Backstage. So where do you see Backstage going? What are some things that you have coming out that you are excited about? So what’s in the future for it?

Avantika Iyer (11:51): So I think the primary thing that you would see, and I’m glad you brought, we were there last week as well, and I gave a couple [00:12:00] of talks. I gave a talk on building a high performance backstage for high performing organizations on Tuesday at Backstage Con. And then on Wednesday we had the backstage Maintainance Track talk, which is to talk about everything up and coming in backstage. So if I miss out on anything, I would say go back to the recording from KubeCon London, which was done on Wednesday by the backstage maintainers, which I was also a part of, which has all the updates that you would need to know about what’s coming [00:12:30] up in 2025 for backstage. And we also celebrated this massive milestone for us. So we just hit five years of being open source, and that’s pretty massive because it’s all thanks to the community.

(12:42): All of us put that effort in together to make it such a successful project. So what’s new and exciting coming into Backstage? I think if you have been using Mac Backstage, you already know that the stable version of the new backend system is out. We are currently very close to getting to the stable version of [00:13:00] the new frontend system. Right now it’s in an alpha state, but internally we’ve been dog fooding that quite heavily with some of the products that we are building. And with that comes this great ability to build extensions in backstage. So I think previously when you used a development backstage, there was a lot of this maintainer owned code that you would have to go and update and wait for pulled requests. If you wanted to just [00:13:30] build an extension for yourself or a plugin for yourself, you should really be owners of it and not have to worry about getting approvals from someone else to bring it into your backstage instance because how can we encapsulate that entire plugin in a way that you don’t really, you own it, you kind of make the changes it trade over it and not have to be blocked on maintainers to get it added to a backstage instance.

(13:54): That really is what the new backend system and frontend system are enabling. And through the frontend [00:14:00] system, you get a lot of these powerful extensions that you can add to add new entity cards to the entity page. So if let’s say you’re creating a plugin in it, it can export an entity page extension that’s essentially going to bring in your entity card into the backstage entity page. So you don’t care what other plugins are shipping like entity cards in there, your card is going to show up there automatically as long as your plugin is being installed within that backstage instance [00:14:30] simultaneously. You can also update, you can export a nav item so that your plugins nav item is going to show up in the sidebar, so on and so forth. So it’s just really, really powerful. It gives you complete control and autonomy over any features that you’re building and trying to ship for backstage.

(14:48): So that’s part of the new front-end system. So keep looking out for updates on that and the moment it kind of hits that stable version, I completely encourage everybody to start learning about it now so that later [00:15:00] when it actually goes to stable, you can adopt it pretty quickly. You don’t really want to be in a place where you’re going and learning about it only then that can take a little bit of effort. The community’s already talking about it quite heavily. The other big thing that we personally at Spotify are doing is we kind of build this AI tool for ourselves as Backstage is a great place to kind of centralize all of your data. We’ve got a ton of tech docs in there already that is being shipped as part of [00:15:30] any of the components that we built and obviously all of these tech docs are indexed on.

(15:35): And so when you go to Backstage Search and you search for something, if it’s going to search all of the components, it’s going to search all of the services and so on and also your tech docs and it’s going to pull up all of those results and show it to you so they can kind of go ahead and search anything that you’re trying to find. You just need a keyword. But the problem with search is the fact that you really need the right kind of keyword. You need to know what you should filter [00:16:00] on. If you’re looking for a specific component, you’re looking for a tech doc, you’re looking for, let’s say a service that’s named a certain way, it’s really hard to find those results sometimes. But the thing is, because all of this knowledge is centralized here anyway, you can, if any engineer is coming onto the platform and trying to find info about something or is trying to look for a specific whatever, something they can sort of now through the AI tool, ask a question.

(16:28): So our AI solution, it’s like a [00:16:30] chat bot that exists in the form of a plugin within our backstage. But yeah, there’s pretty much like with the AI plugin, you have sort of a chat interface, it’s based on LLM models and you will be able to ask the bot like anything you wanted about in the form of a natural question that you would ask someone another human. And it uses all of the data sources that are integrated within Backstage to get you that answer. So the biggest advantage for us at Spotify is the fact that [00:17:00] we have so many engineers, thousands and thousands of engineers spread across so many different geographical regions like working together. If my immediate team member doesn’t have an answer to something, I know someone somewhere in Spotify does have it, but how do I reach out to them? And this is how you reach out to them because they have already put that knowledge into Backstage and I just have to go query it through what we call the ICA tool.

(17:22): So our AI solution is called Aika AI Knowledge Assistant. And so we’ve kind of built that and we’ve been using it internally [00:17:30] for quite some time in our internal backstage, and we are soon going to be selling that as part of the rest of our commercial plugin bundle as well. So we already have four other really amazing plugins that the community loves. This is Insights, our back skill exchange and soundcheck and soundcheck has been really powerful and appreciated by the community quite a bit. And Aika is going to be one that’s going to come out as well. And you might’ve already heard about this, but we’ve been [00:18:00] in a beta phase with a SaaS version of Backstage called Porto. We kind presented it quite a bit and demoed it during KubeCon as well. And there were a lot of people who came and saw the value of having something like this, especially if you do not have engineering resources on your end who are able to build backstage from the bottom up, it takes a lot of engineering investment. This is definitely the way to go because the best part of it [00:18:30] is extensibility, all of that amazing stuff that’s out there in the community right now, which is being shipped as part of the community plugins repo can all be one click installed into your own portal instance. So very powerful, very powerful tool, and this is kind of the direction for Backstage in the future for us. Yeah,

Daniel Afonso (18:52): Well that’s really, really great. I’m actually excited to check them out and I really got me [00:19:00] interested. I have to go ahead and check that out. If the recording for KubeCon is already up when we release this episode, I will link it back there. If not, I’ll also come back and update it so we can link it and everyone can listen to it as well to try to check more. I assume there was also some, you did some demos during those presentations, right?

Avantika Iyer (19:23): Yeah, definitely. There was a demo on a couple of new use cases that have gone out as have been shipped as well. [00:19:30] Definitely recommend having a look at it.

Daniel Afonso (19:34): Okay, thank you. So we have two more questions for you. This one, it’s kind of a bit of a more fun one. So for previous listeners, if you listen to the episodes I did during PD on tour that I like to ask this version of the question, and we kind of already went to what Backstage is, but now I would like for you to tell me, if you had to explain Backstage [00:20:00] to a five-year-old, how would you do it?

Avantika Iyer (20:04): Explaining Backstage to a five-year-old? That’s quite a challenge because I dunno if any five-year-old can actually use Backstage. The only way that I would really truly kind of describe it as probably let’s say as a kid, obviously kids are super, super distracted and [00:20:30] they love a lot of different things. And what do you do for a kid? You have a single toy basket in which you put all of the toys so that they know that one place that they can come to and they can find the toy that they want to play with. Because today they might be interested in one toy, they’re in a certain mood, and tomorrow they might be in a different mood. So if I was a five-year-old, I’d be like, oh, I want to play with this specific thing. Where am I going to go find it? And there’s that one single toy box that I can go where everything exists and this is why that’s really important, [00:21:00] that one single place that they can come to find whatever that they want. And I would say that’s, that’s how I would explain Backstage. It is that one toy box. So you as an engineer, whatever things that you’re playing with every day, using as tools every day, if you had to come to a single place to find it Backstage would be that place.

Daniel Afonso (21:20): Well, that’s really, really good. I really like that because as kids everything is just flying around everywhere. And if you start piecing that [00:21:30] together for us as developers, as engineers, the same thing also happens. Well, that was a really, really good explanation. Thank you. Thank you so much. So we are getting to the end of this episode, but what if the question for you that I have for you, sorry about that, is if people want to stay on top of the news for Backstage at this point, so how can they do it? How can they be updated [00:22:00] and keep following up?

Avantika Iyer (22:01): Yeah, I would say go to backstage io slash community if on your browser or you go tribe in your search backstage io slash community, you have a list of links out there. So we have our own Discord channel for all of the community to come in and participate. And that way you can chat with other people who have also set up backstage for themselves. So any kind of questions you have, any kind of support you wanted to start [00:22:30] learning backstage or dive into it or you’re getting stuck on a specific feature, you’ll find those, you’ll start finding those answers in Discord on that same page. If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see links to join community sessions. So we have monthly community sessions in which we provide these backstage updates as well. And so you can participate, listen to everything that’s being announced over there.

(22:55): And it’s also place for other backstage users, like other organizations [00:23:00] that have adopted Backstage to come in and demo their instances as well, new things that they are working on. So they constantly do that and that’s a way for us to learn from each other. So yeah, updates, demos, any ideas, that’s pretty much where you want to go. The community sessions, you can also subscribe to a monthly backstage newsletter. So all of our latest updates and any kind of new highlights that we’ve found in the community, we kind of share that in the newsletter [00:23:30] as well. So I would say that’s also a great way to stay up to date on it. Lots of different resources. Certainly there’s also a way for you now if you really love Backstage and want to bring it to your company or if you have, we also have trainings and certifications now so that you can become a certified backstage associate. So there’s links to that on that page as well. So lots of different ways you can begin to get involved and anyone and everyone is encouraged to contribute to the open source project. So [00:24:00] go out there, look at the new issues, see a bug that exists that you can solve and start contributing, become part of Open Source.

Daniel Afonso (24:07): Yeah, that’s a lot of resources and I really like that last shout out because it’s very, very easy most of the times to just open GitHub, look at issues looking like, oh wow, I can actually help contribute to this thing. And I feel like that’s the passionate thing that I get out of open source is you just go in there. There’s stuff that out [00:24:30] of our expertise, we can just contribute and takes us. Most of the times can take us five to 10 minutes. So yeah, I’ll definitely try. Also Wink, all of those points you mentioned are on our notes at the end, so if you’re watching, listening to the episode, all this stuff will be linked there that you can check them out. So yeah, we got to the end of our podcast. I would like to ask you, Tika, if you have any other final message, any message [00:25:00] you would like to share, anything that people can reach out to you if they have questions, any places where people can connect with you, if there’s anything you’d like to share. This is now your final spot here.

Avantika Iyer (25:14): Yeah, I think, I mean I’m always happy to connect with anybody who wants to, whether it’s about Backstage or other stuff. Like I said, if you are interested in management and you want to be a manager and you want to hear about my experience doing this for the past three months, [00:25:30] then I’m happy to share that about it. If you’re into public speaking, I can talk to you about stuff. The talks that I’ve given in KubeCon, I’m more than happy to share my experience or even learn from you if you’ve done similar things. So always open for networking. You can find me on LinkedIn. I mean my profile name’s probably this long thing with digits in it, but if you search for Ivanka or Spotify, I’m sure I’ll pop up. And so just send me a connection [00:26:00] request and I’d be happy to chat more than that.

(26:05): It probably, obviously I work at Backstage, so you might think that I’m incredibly biased, but trust me on this, I’ve come in and I’ve seen the value of this product like working on it and I’ve worked on it for two years and I can really see the value. I don’t think in my previous jobs, we never really had a portal like this. So when I first came here it was also really confusing, why would you really need this? But it takes time [00:26:30] to get used to the idea of going to a single place because I was also really used to going to a lot of different distributed places to get my work done. But once you start getting used to the platform, you really see, compared to the first year that I was at Spotify the second year, the amount of times that I go there just to get my daily stuff done, it’s enormous, the change and how much benefit I get out of the platform every day.

(26:54): And there’s not just this technical aspect to it as part of your engineering [00:27:00] work, but it’s also a cultural aspect to it because at least at Spotify, we also, all of our hack weeks, all of our hack days, all of our hack projects are skilled profiles, finding new embedded opportunities. So at Spotify we also do the Zen embed thing where we can go and spend some time on a completely different team to what we are working on for a few months and see what that’s like. So all of these embedded opportunities also kind of surface on backstage. So it’s also a massive [00:27:30] part of our cultural experience and it can be for your organization as well because it’s just so powerful in that sense. So really enables develop a productivity and develop a culture. So I feel like everyone should give it a shot, give it a try, at least sign up like we’ve got the portal beta program. If you use GitHub, you’ll be eligible to sign up for it and you can get into a trial version with it without paying anything and test the product out. There’s so many ways to just, and like I said, even if not all that, go check out the open [00:28:00] source project and look at the issue, start contributing to open source because you add so much value to the community as a developer. And I think that’s pretty much what my final message would be.

Daniel Afonso (28:09): Okay. That is really, really, really great. So thank you so much for joining me for recording this episode. We really value that you took the time to come chat with me. For everyone listening, thank you so much for listening to another episode of Page to The Limit and I’ll see you on the next one. Have an uneventful day. Bye. [00:28:30] That does it for another episode of Page It to the Limit. We would like to thank our sponsor, PagerDuty for making this podcast possible. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite streaming service. If you like what you’ve heard, you can find our show notes at pageittothelimit.com and let’s continue this conversation on PagerDuty Commons at community.pagerduty.com. Thank you so much for joining us and remember, uneventful days are beautiful days.