KCD Brazil '25: Enabling Developers with Dapr & Backstage

for more information visit: https://www.salaboy.com

Transcript

1. Enabling Developers: The art of keeping it simple Francisco & Salaboy
2. Agenda - Backstage as a mechanism to enable teams - Dapr a set of building blocks to enable application developers to create complex distributed applications - Bringing platform teams closer to developers
3. Quienes somos? Francisco Meneses • Associate Openshift Manager en Red Hat • Basado en Chile 󰎧 • Open Source Contributor (Backstage) • Miembro organizador de DevOpsDays Santiago • Todos me llaman Pancho Mauricio Salatino • Ecosystem Engineer at Diagrid • Dapr, Knative, Crossplane contributor • Argentino󰎆 basado en UK 󰏅 • Todos me llaman Salaboy
4. What is the developer experience? Developer experience refers to the experience developers have in the environment where software development occurs and the level of complexity that allows them to turn ideas into usable and useful applications. In simpler terms, a good developer experience is important because it helps developers create and release better software faster.
5. Challenges faced by development teams As organizations have grown—whether in size, geographic presence, or functional roles—to remain competitive, the number of development and application teams has also grown. • Onboarding takes too long. • There is no single source of information. • The proliferation of tools leads to constant review and validation of options. (Analysis paralysis.)
6. Challenges: Onboarding, Lack of Standardization, Fragmentation and Infinite Bookmarks 6 Prevents business to react faster to market changes Jira ArgoCD Documentation on Google Docs Documentation on Confluence Grafana Topology View Sonarqube Git Repositor y Development Team #1 Developer Productivity Challenges How do I get a repo ? Is there a list of existing services ? Development Team Development Team Onboarding Chaos Knowledge Fragmentation Lack of Standardization Infinite Bookmarks X Development Team #2 Who can give me access to ? Where is the documentation ? Tekto n
7. Challenges: Result 7 Developer Productivity is declining RESULT: Development Team ? ? ? ? Focus Lost Lack of focus on the capabilities that matter the most to the business Innovation Stagnation Technical debt ramps up and prevents innovation from being delivered consistently Quality Declines Lack quality puts your business at risk
8. 8 Challenges: Solution: Internal Developer Portal The solution is an Internal Developer Portal Requirements to boost the development team productivity Internal Developer Portal Self-Service Catalog Easy onboarding Extensible and Modular Supported Document Management Development Team
9. Outcome • Developer productivity decreases • Excessive meetings (planning, bugs, war rooms, etc.) Everyone knows this happens!
10. What can we do to improve the conditions for developers? - We're going to create an internal developer portal that magically integrates everything so developers can focus solely on developing. - Great idea - How do we do it? Platform Engineering Team
11. What is an internal developer portal? An internal developer platform (IDP) consists of a set of self-service technologies and tools that developers need to create and deploy code. It also provides simple interfaces to access the organization's ecosystem without requiring expert knowledge of integrated tools, improving the developer experience.
12. Internal Developer Portal Requirements to increase development team productivity Self service (infrastructure and software) Extensible and modular Service Catalog Easy to use
13. Internal Developer Portal
14. https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/01/29/2024-year-in-review-of-cncf-and-top-30-open-source-project-velocity/
15. Backstage Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals. Powered by a centralized software catalog, Backstage restores order to your microservices and infrastructure and enables your product teams to ship high-quality code quickly — without compromising autonomy. Backstage unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a streamlined development environment from end to end.
16. Backstage marketplace
17. Demo Backstage Usando la app https://github.com/salaboy/platforms-on-k8s/ Conference Site Frontend Proposals Agenda Notifications PostgreSQL Redis Kafka
19. Platform Capabilities - More technical - Auto-scaling - GitOps - More focused on enabling teams - Release Strategies - Feature flagging - APIs to make app development easier
20. Platform Capabilities - More technical - Auto-scaling - GitOps - More focused on enabling teams - Release Strategies - Feature flagging - APIs to make app development easier
21. Distributed Application Runtime https://dapr.io
31. Demo Dapr (https://github.com/salaboy/platforms-on-k8s/) Conference Site Frontend Proposals Agenda Notifications Kafka Dapr APIs Dapr APIs Dapr APIs
33. Dapr Backstage Plugin Demo https://github.com/dapr-sandbox/dapr-backstage
36. Recap - Enabling developers by providing the right tools - Developers understand API - Platform teams can leverage the CNCF ecosystem. - It is too hard to keep up as there are too many projects - Backstage can simplify how platform teams expose complex tools to developers
37. Hora de unirse a la comunidad https://backstage.io/community Discord: #brazil Dapr Discord: https://bit.ly/dapr-discord
38. Resources & Links - Backstage.io - Backstage plugins - https://backstage.io/plugins/ - https://backstage.spotify.com/partners/?page=1#all - Dapr Backstage Plugin https://github.com/dapr-sandbox/dapr-backstage - Dapr PubSub Brokers: https://docs.dapr.io/reference/components-reference/supported-pubsub/ -