Getting started with Backstage, hands-on workshop

Hands-on workshop on setting up and customising Backstage (https://backstage.io/).

Workshop outline:
- Why we need better developer portal for maximizing developer effectiveness?
- Setup Backstage on you Local or any cloud provider using k8s.
- Basic overview backstage features
- Learn to configure and customize backstage (theme part such as logo, etc.)
- Configure with authorisation service (Github for simplicity)
- Plugins and adding plugins from Marketplace
- Overview of different types of plugins and one proxy plugin demo

Multi-cloud strategy - From serendipity to necessity...

Multicloud strategy - From serendipity to necessity…

As per IDC, 81% of enterprises are using multiple public clouds along with one or more private cloud deployments. Enterprises embrace multi-cloud strategy to address various business imperatives such as leveraging best-of-breed services, addressing business continuity, managing vendor lock-in etc.However, most enterprises struggle with the complexity of multi-cloud environment when they approach it as a reactive response rather than a strategic initiative.

We help clients to embark on a successful and long term multi-cloud journey with a structured framework that is built on 3 core tenets: workload assessment, multi-cloud operating model and multi-cloud governance.

In this workshop on ‘multi-cloud’ strategy, we will touch upon above-described aspects of what, why and how of multi-cloud. We will elaborate on the structured framework to approach multi-cloud strategy for your enterprise.

Engineering platform, a key to maximize developer effectiveness

In today’s era of technology led businesses, developer effectiveness and experience is key to business agility and building new age engineering solutions.Some key challenges and frictions observed when building a large-scale enterprise system involving multiple teams and/or vendors are - slow speed of delivery, low business agility, hard to do innovation at scale and low cross team collaboration leading to siloed teams and duplication of effort. And due to these challenges, significant time of engineering teams go in mundane, non-value added activities thus reducing overall effectiveness and joy at work!

Our proposal to solve the above common organizational challenges is an Engineering platform which can comprise of various building blocks ranging from but not limited to self-service delivery infrastructure, developer experience portal for knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams and dashboards for delivery and business metrics to track progress. Building such platforms is a long term program and not a point solution, as this needs proper change management and adoption at organization level.

We at Thoughtworks have already done it by building “NEO” - our internal engineering platform!

In this talk we are going to talk about all of the above and also provide guidelines, share tips & tools regarding recommended approach towards building an engineering platform that helps to maximize developer effectiveness leading to better organizational experience and achievement of business goals. We will use NEO as a case study to contextualize why, what and how of engineering platforms.

Outline/Structure of the Talk
- Why and what is an engineering platform? (5 min)
- Five building blocks of a successful engineering platform. (10 min)
- Characteristics & features of engineering platform that leads to better developer experience in overall SDLC. (5-7 min)
- Path to building engineering platform in-house (case study showcase, open source tools & frameworks to leverage) (10 min)
-- NEO, a Thoughtworks internal engineering platform and a developer experience portal (case study showcase, CIO 100 Award)
-- Backstage.IO as a backbone to building developer experience portal (open source tool)
- Patterns and anti-patterns of implementing an engineering platform. (5-7 min)
-- How to measure success?
-- How to apply a thin slice approach for such a large program?

Target Audience:
Technology & engineering leaders at all level from CTO, Head of Engineering to engineering team leads

Prerequisites for Attendees:
Knowledge of DevOps and engineering practices.