مرحباً, كوب دي ، مرحباً ، تلعبني! مرحباً ، لذا ، قبل أن نبدأ our session today عندما أعلم بأن كوب دي يأتي إلى إصرالي فأنا أعلم بأنه في صوت جيدة لأيالي ويأتي معنا اليوم في الجهة ويأتي مع أنه لا يعلم ألعب الإنجلي ويقوم بصوت جيدة لأيالي هل أنت تستطيع أن تتعود؟ حسناً ، هل أنت مستعد؟ شخص أرى مزال طاقة! مزالتو حسنا مزالتو حسنا now that we are done with the important part and the less important people are here on stage so I'm here I'm Arthur Bresen I'm the founder of a company called Stage Central we are focusing on backstage and today we have Antwice with me my partner in crime yeah I'm Antwice I'm the CTO at Stage Central and I like to call myself a software delivery futurist and I love open source do you love open source if you love open source say aye great a lot of open source lovers here and we're here to talk about an especially exciting open source project and that is backstage who here has heard about backstage have you heard about backstage okay some hands that's good if you haven't heard about backstage you definitely will look into it after today's session so backstage was contributed by Spotify to the CNCF about a year ago and became super popular project with more than a thousand enterprise adopters and more than gazillion stargazes on github so definitely highly popular project so what is this thing called backstage what does it do what is it Anton oh that's easy after backstage is an IDP IDP so IDP you mean like an identity provider like a key cloak is that what you mean yeah I understand the confusion no IDP actually stands for well some folks it says stands for internal developer portal but other folks say it's an internal developer platform it's platform alright but I actually I have to say it's an internal delivery platform because it's it's not for you know it's not only about developers it's also for the ops and the testers actually all players of the software delivery game they can all enjoy this thing so you say this platform word quite a lot does it have anything to do with this whole platform engineering trend I've been hearing so much lately yeah yeah yeah well let's dig deeper into that so coming back to myself there's a growing understanding in our industry that in order to achieve that effective collaboration that speed of delivery that the DevOps approach was preaching right we need to take all of the complexity all of the services and functions and APIs and terraform scripts and helm charts and CICD pipelines logs metrics you name it we need to take all of that and somehow build all that into an internal delivery platform that will allow us to have that effective collaboration that speed that we so much need and that's basically brings us the discipline of platform engineering awesome so I will definitely would love to unify all of my systems into one coherent platform so what do I need to build in order to get started well in order to have platform engineering today first of all you need to have software catalog so basically that database that enlists all of your assets and all of your teams and users and services and tools and connects all of them together then on top of that in order to abstract away the complexity you need some self service workflows and templates that allow us to do things in a cost effective way to do things fast to provision new things to create new things easily and then we of course need to be able to integrate with all of the existing tooling we already have and with all of the tooling that we are going to add in the future because the stack continues evolving awesome so like a service catalog like self service workflow templates integrations to all of my systems but cool but does it have to do with backstage though well the good thing is if you want all this you don't have to start from scratch there is a great open source and that's exactly backstage and it has these things baked in so it already brings to the table the software catalog data model and the basement for building the self service workflows and templates and it has the integrations the community has already created close to 100 plugins to all kinds of use cases and it also had documentation as code as a pattern built in and on top of all that we have the presentation layer the customizable UI that you can adapt to your needs so yeah awesome so I'll just go to this nice little website backstage.io download the tool populate a few service for you a few items in the service catalog create a few workflows and I'm a platform engineer alright oh yeah yeah too easy right we've been in this industry for too long to stop believing in magic sadly and that brings us to the pitfalls alright so we've been working with we've been talking to dozens of backstage users and talking and working with few customers implementing backstage and we've realized that there are four common things that you would need to plan for in order to implement a backstage project so Anton the first one you want it you build it exactly so the thing is the backstage was built at Spotify by developers for developers that is to say it wasn't built with the ops mindset so basically even though the website says that it's a platform for building IDPs the fact is it's basically a framework that allows you to scaffold a React.js application with some Node.js backend and to do anything useful with it you need to start editing type script right now folks who eventually find themselves having to build, manage and evolve this thing they're platform engineers in most cases these are your rebranded DevOps folks any DevOps folks here in the crowd I'm a DevOps person right DevOps platform whatever what are your tools of choice usually so probably you know Python right maybe some go but most of all YAML right loads of YAML we're all YAML engineers today so writing type script in order to manage things it's not something we're used to do it's definitely a skill set that most platform engineering teams don't have what we see most organizations we talk to having to do is standing up a whole new development team in order to build backstage and continue evolving it and that brings us to the second pitfall so production you build it you own it and as Ant mentioned backstage is essentially a development framework which means you get to create your own version of an IDP based on the backstage framework and you need to ensure that it's ready for your production according to your production standards so everything that you would think of in production environment you need to take care of it so you need to create docker files if you want it in containers environment do you have a single docker image do you have multiple docker images you have to plan for it do you want to maybe split that into multiple versions or multiple parts once you have that you need to think about writing it in Kubernetes production Kubernetes is obviously the place to go where else Kubernetes of course do you create helm charts customize maybe integrate Argos CD to deliver the builds and when you onboard it in Kubernetes create your own YAML files if that's your choice you also need to take care of availability resilience and scale in order to serve all the developers demand of the tool are you saying none of that is included nope no batteries are included when you need to take care of that we bought a car we got the engine okay that's a fun ride so next up plugins so as we already said a great IDP has to have integrations it's one of the core functionality that we expect from it and backstage is highly extensible in that respect bringing the concept of plugins to the table and as I said the community has already created close to 100 plugins for all kinds of tooling and use cases but when we look when we look deeper into that we'll realize that in order to add a plugin or configure a plugin you need to again edit TypeScript you need to edit the code you need to rebuild the application and then redeploy the whole thing and then pray for everything to continue working so what we see teams are doing they need to stand up a staging environment in order to add each plugin just to add a plugin also to configure a plugin they need to rebuild the code redeploy it and pray that it doesn't screw up the whole thing and that brings us to the last point which is adoption adoption the fact that you deployed the tool created a service catalog created a self-service templates that's awesome it doesn't necessarily mean that the developers are going to use the tool ensure that you collect all the usage metrics ensure that you measure the engagement of the developers around the tool to ensure that it actually fits their needs and works through their common workflows and integrate it with the communication tools that are already in place yeah and you need to bring the data and actually some of the teams we've been talking to they spent like a whole year to stand up an IDP to solve all the technical problems and then they find themselves struggling with bringing in the developers and you know an internal developer platform is actually no good if there are no developers in it that's right and forcing your developers using the tool definitely does not work yeah yeah and developers are stubborn they're busy doing the hard work yeah so to sum it up platform engineering is the way to manage a software organization definitely platform engineering is the way we do DevOps today in order to have platform engineering you need to have an IDP if you want to build an IDP definitely start with open source start with a CNCF project that's backstage and if you want to build on backstage watch out for the pitfalls which are make sure that you are ready for a development project on board backstage make sure that you're ready to run it in production environment that's number 2 make sure that what's the 3rd one the 3rd one is that plugins aren't really plugins that's right and the last one adoption definitely think about adoption before you even start building think about the way organization works and how you're going to bring everyone on board and with that actually well if you want to learn more talk to us and some folks have already told us that they like this t-shirt so for a chance to win one scan the QR code alright thank you coupe day and enjoy the rest of the day


Hey, welcome back everyone. CUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS, Amazon Web Services, re-invent 2021, in-person event on the floor, back in business to CUBE, two live sets, pumping out content left and right, three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage, over 120 interviews, stream 28 hours, linearly on the main site as well as on the CUBE zone. Go to CUBE, re-invent.com to get all the action, all the videos will be there. Of course to CUBE.net, I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Nicholson, my co-host this week, and Sarbih Joel, cloud strategist, influencer, all around, great guy, CUBE alumni, here to break down, re-invent, in context to the cloud industry. Sarbih, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Good to see you guys, in person, finally. I kid, I'm so excited, I've had all these interviews past two years in person and I've been remote, now we're in person, great to do it. Everyone's excited, 27,000 people here at re-invent. Standing in line for classes, by the way, they're not offering these classes online, only the leadership sessions and the keynotes, so if you're not here, you're not getting the classes. Yeah, I like the vibe, actually, I thought it would be both subdued, but it is better than what I thought, and energy is here, but it's not like 2019, it's not. That's 60,000 people, you couldn't even get through the hallway. I mean, any company would love to have 27,000 people, but I got to say, this year, we was just talking earlier on the segment this morning, I love to get your thoughts on this.  So great, check, you need to buy the technology tax, and then you had to fill in the glue layers, so you kind of roll your own and build it up, now everything kind of is scaling up, and Next Gen Cloud is a completely different architecture. You got serverless, you got all the glue layers, all pretty much there, and you can still add stuff on it, so a completely different mindset, changing the startup speed game, changing the enterprise, looking pretty good. What's your reaction to the new architecture in Cloud, vis-a-vis where it came from? Yeah, my reaction to the new architecture is that, number one, it's just new, like we change stuff all the time in software stacks, right? And what I sort of was grasping within myself, it's sitting in my hotel in the morning listening to Warner's keynote, was that we have started to accumulate the technical debt even in Cloud. So we cooked up some stuff with the scripts and we automated stuff with programming language of your choice, or CLIs, then became the cloud formation, automation of orchestration of your cloud stack, if you will, and then HashiCorp are, like so HashiCorp are sitting on the side there, but now there's another abstraction layer on top of that, which was announced during Warner's keynote today. So I think the new abstraction layers leave the previous architectures kind of a little stale, so it's always like, what should you do? Should you refactor your existing stacks, or should you not touch that? Just go from now on to the new architecture. I think it's getting busy, complicated, a lot of number of services. What do you think other people are saying? I saw you did a little snippet with Dion Hetzgliff online, got his tweet there, you got a big video coming out. As you talk to other folks and influencers and people in the front lines, what are they saying about Amazon reinvent this year? Yeah, I think almost everybody is saying that it's number of services is expanding exponentially, and I was thinking that 200 plus number of services, so whatever that number is today, it's mind boggling. I totally understand that when you have two PISA teams that they want to take the credit for creating a new service and they want to publish it, they want to do the press release and all that, but my request to all cloud providers, mainly three, is to not call everything a service, new service, call that feature of a service. So number of services has to be reduced, collapse if you will, we need umbrella services, and then under that, there should be features of services. That's one thing. Another sort of feedback I got from some second tier partners is that they have the competency program for partners, right? And they announced that, and they had that earlier, but they had new competencies. So it leaves the second or third tier partners in the cold. Only the first tier partners can get those competencies because for that, they have to spend a lot of money training people, then they got that jackpot that, oh, you can do this. So those are the... This whole services thing and what do you call a service? I mean, if you call everything a service, a new feature of DNS or a new thing here and there, serverless, there'd be thousands of features, services. I think Amazon kind of, I think they called it down to like 200, it's kind of the number that we hear. But isn't that part of the role of the partner, the services provider, the consultancy, to act as a bridge between all of those services and features, whatever you want to call them, and figuring out exactly what the end user customer actually needs? There's sort of a, the idea that AWS is messaging here is targeted directly towards end user customers. There's a lot to be desired there because how do you translate that? Compare and contrast that with sort of the Steve Jobs approach of there shall be three. There will be a larger medium and a small. I know that this is more complex, but when you come out and you say 475 different kinds of instances, you're leaving that to your partners to translate. And to your point, if you're segregating those partners into categories where only a top tier has access to everything, it's an interesting place to be. So a couple of discussions I had with partners was that I actually suggest them to create a bank of reference architectures, we call that in Amazon terms, but it's not only technical side of things, but business as well. So they need to create some sort of principle based architectures and have a bank of that and then sort of prescribe that to their customer base. I think that's the only way to simplify these things because as you said, if they're like, we have 200 different type of instances for instance, right, it is hard, it is really hard. So I mean, I want to get your thoughts on this, I mean, we talk about this on Twitter all the time, so for the folks watching, if you want to follow our rants and raves on Twitter, follow us on Twitter, you'll get all the action, all the influencers are there. Competition, I've been ranting all week and been saying it for a long time, there's no real, Microsoft's not even close to Amazon. I mean, I'm a little bit over the top, but I'll just say that if Amazon goes unchecked, Microsoft's ecosystem's going to get decimated. Because why wouldn't, why would I want to run software, my software, on a sub-optimal performance infrastructure? Okay, now Microsoft had Windows back in the day and had the system software and the application suite, but they encouraged developers to build on top of Windows. They're quote, dot net or ecosystem. Okay, so that game's over. Okay, I guess Windows runs on Amazon too, whatever, but now the cloud is the Windows. The cloud is the system software. So developers are running on top of the cloud. So who wins? I think open wins, not open source. Open source and open are different things, we always discuss that. I think open wins, the closed systems have this problem of protectionism, which doesn't work with our little kids at home, or your economy as whole, when you protect your local industry, the economy goes down. I've seen that, I'm an economist by education, as you guys know. So I think it's the same, if you protect too much of whatever you have, I think it has its adverse effect. But there's one sort of narrative, Satya sort of narrates, if you will, he says that, hey, when you use Windows, we, you keep everything 100%. We are not taking a cut. When you're sitting in a cloud marketplace, somebody's getting a cut. So that's their argument. Kerry Chen said it's not, because he kind of puked on what I said. He said better could win. Yes. That's one thing. So I, okay, by that, I guess Azure could be better in some use cases. But I think overall, I think Amazon wins hands down currently. Certainly with the custom processors. You haven't mentioned GCP. No, actually the GCP. I mean, what can you say about it? Well, what you could say is that AWS right now has either constructed or is benefiting from the highest barrier to entry to any business in the history of our planet. You could look at the investment that GCP is making to the tune of $6 billion a year to go after Market Share. Now, are they going after current Market Share, which is arguably the 20% of IT that's in cloud now, or are they going for future Market Share, which is a piece of the larger pie? So when you talk about who wins, it's still, I think it's still possible for, and you left Oracle, you left Oracle out. I think it's still possible for Oracle. I can tell you about Oracle. Hold on, hold on, hold on. This is a thought exercise. I'm going to ask you guys this question. Maybe rhetorical, you don't need to answer it.  You take the incentives away. Yeah, yeah. How, why are you on those platforms? We know that Oracle used a lot of- Yeah, sorry, sorry to cut you off. So we know that Oracle used incentives, five X quota release for sales and all that stuff. We know that, a lot of people know that, right? So the cloud became shelfware there. Like that, we know the story, right? I'm leaving Oracle to the side, but I think Google has legs. Google's cloud has legs. They are very engineering focused company. They are more open source friendly and data science friendly as well. So I think they are actually a number two personally, I believe, I mean a developer by heart. So they are number two developer cloud after Amazon. I think it's well known, I agree with you by the way, I think people may not know this, but it's well known in the industry that Amazon has been mostly afraid of Google more than Microsoft. I think now because of this market share, the ecosystem war is going to happen in a very short period of time. Microsoft's more of a threat, I guess, on paper, but Google's got more threat to slingshot back in front, technically. Because if you look at Graviton, the stack that they're building for ISVs and developers, Microsoft clearly, I mean, Amazon's clearly winning, Google can pull that off if they didn't get it, they got it out of their own way. Let me tell you, okay, the one thing actually, if we want to know what was a fumble this time at the end of the month, right? I have some, actually, I will talk about it in my video and we don't have enough time here. So I think Google will do better because they're open, they, and Amazon is complex. I was thinking when, during the keynotes, like what are the clues Amazon actually has to leaving which is helping these, Google actually, Google and Azure, mainly Google. Google is simple, actually, a lot simpler to use, but again, having said that, there's one thing actually in the new term I'm trying to define is the feature proximity. Amazon has feature proximity, like the best, you know, like when you are doing one thing, you want to do another thing, they have that already there. And they're ahead of the game. They are like 5G, like private 5G and all that stuff. It's very futuristic, like nobody. By the way, I got Amazon to agree to get me some private 5G for when we go back home. We're going to set an outdoor area for some open cube action with some 5G. Let's do that. We actually, we can put that on like a nice van with the logos and all that. We'll park it right there on El Camino, right next to Stanford University. And maybe we could live in one of those things too. Oh, I'll see you. I'll get a taco truck and I'll join you guys. Taco truck for free food. Yeah, let's do that. All serious guys, I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up this segment on the analysis of the cloud industry. What do you guys think, in your opinion, is going to take, I'll start by saying, I think Amazon, if not contested for their leadership in the performance of Silicon and the stack for software developers and owners to run the fastest they can run away with this. So I think Microsoft and Google better be cranking right now to make it easy and have Silicon advantage as well. And I think clearly if the ecosystem's going to be at play because the shift is happening to modern software development, low code, no code, in every shift, everyone will go to the best performance, independent of cost and incentives. Obviously Amazon's got lower cost too, so they got the flywheel going. I can make mine short. I think GCP can also be successful. But I think that already the amount of momentum that AWS has, the wind behind its sails, I was at EMC for many years and we used to joke about our arch nemesis, Hitachi data systems, and saying that they were quite discouraged every morning as they woke up learning that they were a year further behind. Every night they went to sleep. They woke up the next day and they were a year further behind. Watching the announcements coming out of this event this week, I think there are some people with GCP and Microsoft and others who have that sense. But having said that, we're at the dawn of the era of cloud. There's plenty of room for a lot of players. When you give us your thoughts, I'd like your answer to the question, how much are consumers in the driver's seat today? Will the customers be able to demand multi-sourcing? Yeah, I think customers, you work with your money, right? So customers can demand that, but at the same time, customers can get stuck in a platform and they can't get out. There's, we usually talk about vendor lock-in. Like, there's one thing that Amazon keeps saying that we are open, we are open and that other vendors are like these brands. I think that kind of narrative can come bite back to them. It's not a good thing to say. Like, you don't want to be cocky about your features or you are the best and all that stuff. I think you want to stay humble and respect the other guys as well because they are coming right behind you. I think the key is developers. I have the bias towards developers because I was a developer, but I think, I totally believe deep down, actually I have tried to put my developer hat off and still think that way about these constructs, if you will. Developers are the people who call the shots. If you are not a developer friendly, you can't do much. That's a good point. That's my warning to Amazon. Don't go away from it. You are number one developer cloud. Stay there. Industry focus is good, but put that to the side. Not make that front center. Google has made that front center. I think that's a mistake. Yeah, and you got the features, the right features, but again, speed, performance. Developers, tap to the opportunity. I mean, developers want to move fast. I mean, that's the entrepreneurship. Sharpie, great to have you on theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks for having me here and I enjoyed it. Great to have you here. All right, Dave Nicholson here. Nice to have you guys. Thanks for being here. Dave Nicholson, Cube host. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE, the world leader in tech coverage. We'll be back with more live coverage from ReInvent after this short break.