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 OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks   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/ Socials: Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks Website: https://openobservability.io/ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon Lee Mills =============== LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codetoy Mastodon: @[email protected]