Wrapping up BackstageCon & KubeCon North America 2024

Last week the platform world decamped to Salt Lake City, Utah to attend the annual BackstageCon & KubeCon North America conference.

Roadie joined in, of course, and contributed to a lively debate about the future of both spaces. We didn’t present at either conference this time around (more from us in this space in April next year when BackstageCon & KubeCon return to the EU), but some great names did.

BackstageCon

Organised by the fine folks at Amazon (Byran Landes) and RedHat (Balaji Sivasubramanian), this years North American edition of BackstageCon was everything we’ve come to expect and enjoy from a BackstageCon. We heard from Microsoft, Booking.com, and Roku, as well AWS, Redhat and Spotify.

Key take-aways:

• Adopting a product mindset for your Platform continues to be the best way to drive adoption
• A lot of first-time adopters were present, learning about the journey to adoption and the best path to get to a complete Backstage instance
• There was a big focus on defence and security and how Backstage can help organise information for companies in those sectors

Our pick of the sessions:

• Himanshu from Harness gave a great overview of what it takes to drive adoption of Backstage, based on his experience both at Spotify and Humanitec. Key for us was the practical tips in the final third of the talk.

All the videos for the BackstageCon sessions can be found here.

The full schedule of the event can be found here.

KubeCon

KubeCon is inherently a much broader, less Backstage-focused affair, but Backstage still made a lot of appearances in other talks. As an enabler of broader platform initiatives or as the necessary precursor to platform functionality to development teams, Backstage is still the #1 go-to product for Platform teams looking to make an impact.

Key take-aways:

• CNCF officially launched the Certified Backstage Associate
• Security rose in importance, with a full day of Keynotes addresses dedicated to it, and Wiz and Akamai particularly prominent sponsors
• Patrik and Ben from the core maintainer team ran their update session on upcoming changes, focusing on the new declarative frontend 💪

Our pick of the sessions:

• Benson Phillips and Rob Heckel from Toyota Connected ran through their implementation of a platform composed solely of CNCF projects. They’ve focused heavily on ArgoCD and Backstage when building out their platform and gave a great overview of what they’ve been up to.

All the KubeCon sessions will be uploaded soon and can be found here.

The full schedule of the event can be found here.