Get a rundown on the improvements in Backstage v1.34 - plus a mega presentation and demo from OP Financial Group on their entire Backstage adoption journey. Watch as they go from agile and DevOps best practices, to experimenting with a Backstage MVP, to evolving to the full-featured, centralized developer hub they have today - the main development platform and knowledge center for 1,000 monthly active users inside OP. If you’re looking for ideas on how to add value to your IDP and make it indispensable to your own developers, this one is not to be missed!
00:05 🛠️ First, Backstage core maintainer Ben Lambert gives a quick rundown on 🚀 v1.34 release highlights, including a few breaking changes (Keyv, Notifications API Routes, and Scaffolder Gitlab Module), more Catalog performance improvements, lifecycle and health updates, Bitbucket API throttling, custom service-to-service tokens, more improvements and fixes to the new Yarn Plugin for even simpler updates, and `node-fetch` removal in backend plugins and packages.
05:01 👋 Meet the OP team. 🍿Then sit back and enjoy an inside look on the evolution of “OP Hub” - their Backstage-powered IDP. Introducing Henri Helakari (OP’s cloud technologies tribe lead), Jyrki Koistinen (OP Hub product owner), and Heikki Hellgren (OP Hub lead developer/part-time Santa Claus, aka @drodil on GitHub).
07:09 Henri gives an overview of “OP Financial Group in brief”. 🇫🇮 Made up of 99 cooperative banks and 2.1 million owner-customers, OP Financial Group is Finland’s largest financial services group.
08:23 “Towards being a software house”. OP’s journey toward the public cloud and developer experience (DX) begins. Founded in 1902, the group began getting serious about adopting modern agile practices in 2018. Henri hits the highlights in his overview of the past seven years.
17:48 Jyrki takes back the mic, focusing on OP’s Backstage adoption story, month by month, year by year. In 2022, they started experimenting with a Backstage MVP - and haven’t looked back since. Hear how they evolved their developer hub step by step to build a platform that grew from 300 monthly active users to 1,000 in just over a year.
35:02 “Metrics, Monitoring, Ops”. How OP invested in data gathering to discover issues and prioritize their efforts while addressing the needs of their IDP’s 2,539 all-time active users.
35:55 Building the “Engineering Data Platform” (EDP) and team.
37:12 💡10 lessons and tips from OP’s journey so far.
45:07 Heikki gives a behind-the-scenes tour around OP Hub 👀, including the open source plugins they’re using as well as custom integrations - like an onboarding flow that makes it easier for your devs to find the self-service template they want, how they use Badges as a scorecard solution for encouraging healthier tech, and Herbert, an AI chatbot that integrates with OpenAI and OP’s internal Jira and Confluence knowledge bases to answer OP-specific questions faster than even their most experienced devs can.
It’s a good one, folks!
55:38 And before time ran out, OP and Backstage maintainers got to do some 🙋Q&A with the community about how to approach entities in the Catalog system model and more.
Join the Backstage community!
Backstage is an open framework for building internal developer portals (IDPs). It was created by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2020. The Backstage Community Session is the monthly meetup where we all come together to listen to the latest maintainer updates, learn from each other about adopting, share exciting new demos or discuss any relevant topic like developer effectiveness, developer experience, developer portals, and more.
🗓 Join us for our monthly Community Sessions: github.com/backstage/community/tree/main/backstage-community-sessions
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🧑🏼‍💻 For features, demos, and docs: backstage.io
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