CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2025: Full Schedule

CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2025 taking place on 1 April. This event is happening in person at Excel London in London, England.

The Sched app allows you to build your schedule, but is not a substitute for your event registration. You must be registered for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, and have an All-Access pass in order to participate in the sessions.

To view the full event schedule for a specific CNCF-hosted Co-located event, you can use the right-hand navigation bar to sort and filter.

The schedule is subject to change.

09:00 BST

BackstageCon | Welcome + Opening Remarks, Bajaji Sivasubramanian, Bryan Landes, & Blair Fraser, Program Co-Chairs

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:00 - 09:05 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Speakers

Balaji Sivasubramanian

Head of Product, Developer Tools, Red Hat

Balaji is the Head of Product, Developer Tools at Red Hat, where he leads the development of products to address the needs of developers, including Red Hat Developer Hub (based on Backstage.io) and Podman Desktop. Before joining Red Hat, Balaji served as the Executive VP of Product... Read More →

Bryan Landes

Sr. Global Solutions Architect, Amazon

Blair Fraser

Partnerships Lead, Spotify

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:00 - 09:05 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

09:10 BST

Unlocking Backstage’s Potential: Driving Adoption and Maturity With Your Developer Community - Stanley Nicholl, Spotify

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:10 - 09:35 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

In this talk, we will explore how to unlock the full potential of Backstage by leveraging your greatest asset—your developer community. The first step in this journey is adoption and we’ll delve into proven strategies for driving users to Backstage across organizations, ensuring that it becomes an integral part of your engineering ecosystem. By presenting a phased maturity model, we will demonstrate how to engage users, foster continuous improvement, and empower teams to become active contributors, thus maximizing the benefits of “innersourcing”.

Additionally, we will share real-world success stories and lessons learned from various adopters, providing valuable insights and actionable takeaways. Whether you are just getting started, or looking to enhance your current implementation, this talk will equip you with the tools and knowledge to elevate your Backstage journey.

Speakers

Stanley Nicholl

Success @ Spotify Backstage, Spotify

Joining Spotify in 2023 as a Senior Customer Success Engineer, Stanley helps organizations maximize the value of Backstage focusing on adoption and empowering engineering teams to collaborate. With over a decade of experience in software engineering, product strategy, and customer... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:10 - 09:35 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

09:40 BST

⚡ Lightning Talk: Backstage Way of Cost Engineering: How To Save 30k USD and More - Long Zhang & Kristina Kondrashevich, Electrolux Group

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:40 - 09:50 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Electrolux has successfully adopted Backstage and developed numerous plugins to enhance their development workflow. One of their most significant plugins, designed for infrastructure management, has proven to be highly popular among developers. However, this success brought a new challenge: the potential for uncontrolled cloud spending as developers over-provisioned infrastructure.

To address this issue, Platform Team decided to integrate cloud cost visibility directly into Backstage. By developing the InfraWallet plugin, developers now can monitor their cloud spending within the familiar Backstage environment. This plugin, now open-sourced, offers a transparent view of cloud costs, enabling developers to make informed decisions and optimize their resource usage.

In this presentation, we will dive into the details of Electrolux's journey, exploring how they harnessed the power of Backstage helping developers to manage cloud costs efficiently.

Speakers

Long Zhang

Senior SRE, Electrolux

Long Zhang is now a senior SRE at Electrolux working on its IoT system’s observability and reliability. Long holds a Ph.D. degree in software reliability from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. His research work focuses on self-healing software, chaos engineering, and a... Read More →

Kristina Kondrashevich

SRE Product Manager, Electrolux Group

In my life, I have been responsible for writing code, managing teams, and improving delivery processes. Today, as a PM, I support Platform and SRE teams to bring traditional product management practices into the way of working. We treat our developers as consumers and our main goal... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:40 - 09:50 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Technical deep dives on Backstage topics customizing+scaling+securing+plugin development+etc

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

09:55 BST

Sponsored Keynote: The Future is Backstage - Pia Nilsson, Spotify

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:55 - 10:00 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

The Future is Backstage: Building a better platform from the framework up
Every business is now a software business…and every company is now a technology company. The world of technology has become more fragmented than ever before — with workflows distributed across tons of tools, systems, and services. Additionally, teams are now distributed, and asynchronous collaboration has become the norm.

At Spotify, we believe that teams are most effective, and happiest, when the chaos is controlled so they can focus on innovating. That’s why we open sourced Backstage in 2020, and continue to invest in its future today. With Backstage, teams can spend more time innovating and delivering value to your organization — and a lot less on the noise.

Backstage’s success in open source — and its evolution as a mission-critical tool for Spotify’s R&D teams — has shown us that there’s opportunity to make that true not only for engineering teams, but for all the folks involved in developing software across your organization. In this keynote, we’ll dive into how Spotify is investing in the future of Backstage, and leading the way toward development best practices at-large.

Speakers

Pia Nilsson

Senior Directo, Spotify

Pia is Spotify’s Senior Director of Engineering and Head of Platform Developer Experience, working tirelessly to provide the best experience for Spotify’s developers. She started her career as a backend engineer for 14 years working across telecom, pharma, retail, banking, and... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 09:55 - 10:00 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

10:05 BST

10:20 BST

AM Break 2

Tuesday April 1, 2025 10:20 - 10:40 BST

TBA

Tuesday April 1, 2025 10:20 - 10:40 BST
TBA

Breaks

Event + Breaks OpenTofu Day, BackstageCon, Cloud Native University, Data on Kubernetes Day, EnvoyCon

10:40 BST

Instrumenting Observability for an IDP on Backstage Using OpenTelemetr - Ekansh Gupta, SigNoz & Haardik Dharma, NYU

Tuesday April 1, 2025 10:40 - 11:05 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Backstage, has emerged as a powerful solution to centralize these resources, improving developer productivity and efficiency. However, achieving robust observability for an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) built on Backstage is critical to monitor its usage, health, and performance. OpenTelemetry (OTel), a vendor-neutral observability framework, offers the perfect toolkit for achieving this goal.

In this session, we will demonstrate how to instrument and extend Backstage to collect custom observability metrics using OpenTelemetry. Attendees will gain practical insights into setting up and integrating an OpenTelemetry metrics service with the Backstage backend to push metrics to an OpenTelemetry Collector.

Key Takeaways:
1. Foundational Concepts
2. Hands-On Implementation
3. Integration and Visualization Using OpenTelemetry
4. Practical Applications

By the end, Participants will get equipped with the knowledge and tools to instrument observability for their Backstage deployments.

Speakers

Haardik Dharma

Developer, NYU

Haardik is currently working as a Software Developer at Civo. Before joining Civo, he worked with the Kubernetes Working Group Policy as part of the Linux Foundation Mentorship. Haardik is passionate about all things cloud-native and open-source software. When he is not working, he... Read More →

Ekansh Gupta

SDE, SigNoz

Ekansh is a Software Development Engineer, with active involvement in various open-source and cloud native communities for upwards two years now. He was previously an SDE Intern at SteamLabs. He is also a speaker for a couple of talks at PyCon, KubeCon and MozFests. Ekansh is a Google... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 10:40 - 11:05 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

11:15 BST

Driving Monorepo Adoption With Backstage - Chau Vu, Zipline

Tuesday April 1, 2025 11:15 - 11:40 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

As a company grows, the number of applications to maintain also increases. Using a monorepo is a common solution to address many pain points when scaling up an organization. However, onboarding new customers to a relatively young monorepo while also supporting the migration of hundreds of existing applications, each with its own infrastructure and observability stack, presents significant challenges.
At Zipline, we leverage Backstage's core features, such as Software Catalog and Software Templates, enabling developers to deploy a new application on AWS and Kubernetes within 10 minutes. This includes pre-configured observability in Grafana, as well as on-call features in PagerDuty and Slack, thanks to Backstage's rich ecosystem of plugins.
In this session, we will present the methodology we used to determine the sequence of Backstage features to introduce as we grow our monorepo, and provide tips on how you can apply these practices to meet your organization's specific needs.

Speakers

Chau Vu

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Zipline

Chau Vu is a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer in the Developer Experience team at Zipline, with a focus on boosting developer efficiency in the development and release of applications from a monorepo. With a decade of experience across big companies and early startups, she has experiences... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 11:15 - 11:40 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Beginner
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

11:50 BST

Panel: What Do Cars, Clothes, Wardrobes and MRI Machines Have in Common? - Scott Guymer, Philips; Remi Higuchi, H&M group; David Terol, Philips; Jan Magnusson, Ikea; Martin Wanerskar, Volvo Cars

Tuesday April 1, 2025 11:50 - 12:25 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

What does it take for non-software companies to adopt and thrive with modern developer platforms like Backstage? In this panel, leaders from renowned global brands—spanning automotive, fashion, furniture, and healthcare—will share their journeys of overcoming unique challenges to improve developer experience.

These organizations face struggles familiar to many Backstage adopters: integrating with legacy systems, fostering internal alignment, and proving the value of a developer portal in environments where technology supports the business rather than leads it. From initial hurdles to transformative successes, our panelists will discuss how Backstage became a key driver of modernization.

Join this session for candid insights, practical strategies, and diverse perspectives on how Backstage is transforming industries you might not expect—and why their lessons matter for your Backstage journey.

Speakers

Martin Wanerskar

Product Manager, Volvo Cars

Jan Magnusson

Ikea

David Terol

Program Director Software Excellence, Philips

Engineering and Program Director with 25+ years of global leadership across Communication, Semiconductor, and Healthcare sectors. Proven track record at industry technology leaders like Ericsson, Marvell Technology, and Royal Philips, directing multidisciplinary hardware/software... Read More →

Scott Guymer

Principal Engineer, Developer Experience, Philips

Scott is a Principal Engineer working as part of the Software Excellence team in Philips. He works with teams from across Philips to help them make software better. He is passionate about improving the developer experience through automation, tooling, and better practices.Scott comes... Read More →

Remi Higuchi

Software Engineer・Co-driver of Engineering Culture, H&M group

A software engineer passionate about blending technical skills with a design-focused and business-aware approach

Tuesday April 1, 2025 11:50 - 12:25 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Beginner
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

12:25 BST

Lunch Break 3

Tuesday April 1, 2025 12:25 - 13:30 BST

TBA

Tuesday April 1, 2025 12:25 - 13:30 BST
TBA

Breaks

Event + Breaks BackstageCon, Cloud Native + Kubernetes AI Day, Cloud Native University

13:30 BST

High Performance Backstage for High Performing Organizations - Avantika Iyer & Jack Palmer, Spotify

Tuesday April 1, 2025 13:30 - 13:55 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

If you’re a large organisation with thousands of employees who use Backstage everyday, you have undoubtedly encountered performance challenges at the database and network level at that scale. And guess what? Spotify does too!

In this talk, we will be sharing Spotify’s vast expertise in scaling and optimising Backstage for thousands of engineers and their systems.
Tune in to learn more about
- supporting over 100 custom plugins
- horizontally scaling plugin backends
- preventing rate limiting woes
- preparing and testing your Backstage’s ability to handle failure scenarios

Speakers

Avantika Iyer

Engineering Manager, Spotify Inc.

Avantika Iyer is a Engineering Manager at Spotify and leads the delivery of Backstage's open source and commercial products.

Jack Palmer

Staff Engineer, Spotify

Jack is a Staff Engineer at Spotify, working across all things Backstage. He is actively working on Spotify’s Portal product with a strong focus on improving adoption for the community. Previously, he has been involved with maintaining Spotify’s internal implementation of Backstage... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 13:30 - 13:55 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

14:05 BST

Exemplar-y Backstage Templates - Brent Swisher, ITHAKA

Tuesday April 1, 2025 14:05 - 14:30 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Backstage templates are an incredibly powerful tool. They are also one of the hardest to get right. You create a template - all the best practices and tooling, it’s PERFECT! Then two days pass, and it’s out of date. The next time you use it, there are outdated dependencies, CVEs and broken tests.

Why is maintaining templates so painful? For all their power, the development cycle can be excruciatingly slow. Package managers and CI/CD pipelines break when they encounter a filename containing a templated string. You have to validate changes by running the entire template and examining the output.

At ITHAKA, we’ve solved this with something we call “exemplar” templates. With a shockingly simple custom action, we create templates from running, deployable example projects - our “exemplars”. Then we can use standard tooling like Yarn and Renovate to proactively maintain them. In this talk I will share our templating journey and how you can start using “exemplar” projects for your templates.

Speakers

Brent Swisher

Senior Software Engineer, ITHAKA

Hi! I’m Brent Swisher, a Senior Software Engineer currently working at ITHAKA, a nonprofit focused on improving access to education. I work on the Platform Experience & Shared Components team, where I explore Backstage best practices, maintain our micro-frontend infrastructure... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 14:05 - 14:30 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

14:40 BST

Security Behind the Curtains With Event Monitoring - Paul Schultz, Red Hat

Tuesday April 1, 2025 14:40 - 15:05 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Backstage is now an essential platform for software development, but how do you track critical events like logins, data access, and configuration changes? How do you categorize these events by severity or ensure you're capturing all the necessary information for analysis? This talk introduces Backstage's Auditor, a new core service designed to answer these questions and enhance the security of your Backstage platform. We'll explore its key features: capturing a wide range of security-relevant events, categorizing them by severity, capturing rich metadata for analysis, tracking the outcome of operations, and integrating with Backstage's authentication and plugin system. We'll also dive into the flexible configuration options for directing log output and showcase how these features work in a real-world scenario. This talk equips platform engineers and Backstage developers with the knowledge to enhance security, meet compliance, and gain deeper insights into their platform's activity.

Speakers

Paul Schultz

Software Engineer, Red Hat

Hi! I'm Paul Schultz, a Software Engineer at Red Hat. I started as an intern in 2021 and now work on open-source projects like Devfile and Backstage. As engineer for Red Hat Developer Hub (based on Backstage), I tackle maintenance challenges – dependencies, version control, automated... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 14:40 - 15:05 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Technical deep dives on Backstage topics customizing+scaling+securing+plugin development+etc

Content Experience Level Beginner
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

15:05 BST

PM Break 2

Tuesday April 1, 2025 15:05 - 15:20 BST

TBA

Tuesday April 1, 2025 15:05 - 15:20 BST
TBA

ArgoCon

Event + Breaks ArgoCon, BackstageCon, Cloud Native + Kubernetes AI Day, Observability Day, Platform Engineering Day

15:20 BST

From Click To Chaos: Linking Argo Workflows and Backstage for Automated Testing - Chris Heisz & Luke Beamish, Neo4j

Tuesday April 1, 2025 15:20 - 15:45 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

In this session we are going to discover how we, at Neo4j integrated Spotify’s Backstage with Argo Workflows to transform a single click in our Aura Portal into powerful Kubernetes events for integration and Chaos Testing. This talk delves into our journey of linking Backstage actions to automated workflows, enabling Cloud Engineers, and Application Developers to effortlessly trigger complex testing environments directly from our internal developer portal. Learn about the technical challenges, the solutions we implemented, and the transformative impact on our testing processes—streamlining integration tests and introducing Chaos Engineering practices that fortify our Kubernetes environments.

Speakers

Luke Beamish

Neo4j

Chris Heisz

Senior Platform Engineer, Neo4j

Based in Brighton, UK, Chris is a Senior Platform Engineer at Neo4j with a background in SRE. He is a regular speaker at tech conferences. With a heavy focus on enhancing Developer Experience, leveraging his expertise to streamline workflows and empower engineers in adopting and scaling... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 15:20 - 15:45 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

15:55 BST

Fixing Resource Labeling: Tying Infrastructure Metadata To Backstage With Terraform - Michael Reichenbach, 1KOMMA5°

Tuesday April 1, 2025 15:55 - 16:20 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Consistent and accurate resource labeling is essential in cloud environments. However, manual or inconsistent practices often result in labels that are incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate.

Learn how to restructure and label infrastructure using Backstage components as the source of truth for metadata. With an open-source Terraform provider for Backstage, metadata and labels are automatically injected, keeping them consistent and up-to-date with every plan. To ensure reliability, a metadata wrapper module was developed, and the provider’s resiliency enhanced, preventing Backstage outages from disrupting deployments.

This session will provide a clear understanding of how to integrate Terraform with Backstage to enable automated label injection by structuring infrastructure around components. Attendees will also gain actionable insights to bridge the gap between infrastructure management and the Backstage metadata catalog.

Speakers

Michael Reichenbach

Senior Platform Engineer, 1KOMMA5°

Michael is a Senior Platform Engineer at 1KOMMA5°, leveraging over ten years of experience building developer-centric platforms. Michael has pioneered Helm-based deployments for Google Cloud Run, introduced service catalogues, and implemented Backstage in multiple organizations... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 15:55 - 16:20 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Transforming dev experience+streamlining dev workflow+doing more with less using Backstage

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

16:30 BST

The Hitchhiker's Guide To Upgrading Backstage: Don't Panic! - Debabrata Panigrahi & Jenil Jain, Harness

Tuesday April 1, 2025 16:30 - 16:55 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Upgrading Backstage is a crucial part of maintaining a modern developer portal, but it can be daunting. As a team actively maintaining Backstage in our organization, we’ve tackled challenges like managing breaking changes, plugin compatibility, and anticipating new features.

This session shares a practical guide to upgrading, focusing on tools like backstage-cli for version checks, nightly builds to test individual packages without a full upgrade, and leveraging Backstage Enhancement Proposals (BEPs) to stay ahead of changes. We’ll cover real-world strategies for incremental upgrades, automation, and minimizing disruptions, alongside lessons learned from navigating unexpected pitfalls.

By the end of the session, you’ll have a clear roadmap to streamline your upgrades, reduce risk, and stay ahead of breaking changes—all while keeping your catalog and team sanity intact.

Speakers

Debabrata Panigrahi

Senior Developer Relations Engineer, Harness

I'm a DevRel Engineer at Harness's IDP team. I have been contributing to open source for the last four years, previously part of the Kubernetes Release team, and contributed to sig-contribex.

Jenil Jain

Mr, Harness

I am Jenil Jain, a Staff Software Engineer at Harness, where I currently work on the Internal Developer Portal. I've been with Harness for almost 4.5 years, primarily focusing on frontend development throughout my career. Before joining Harness, I was part of Flipkart's Mobile Web... Read More →

Tuesday April 1, 2025 16:30 - 16:55 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Any
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

17:00 BST

⚡ Lightning Talk: How Silverflow Uses Backstage To Streamline Engineering and Compliance - Daniel O'Neill, Silverflow B.V.

Tuesday April 1, 2025 17:00 - 17:10 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

At Silverflow, Backstage has become an essential tool for enabling better engineering practices, improving compliance workflows, and simplifying service discovery.

Code Health: Backstage and SoundCheck provide a platform to measure and monitor code health using quality standards. This helps our teams maintain robust engineering practices and focus on continuous improvement.

Compliance Management: By integrating compliance standards and automating evidence collection, Backstage has significantly reduced the time and effort required for audits, allowing teams to focus more on building, reducing cognitive load.

Service Discovery: Backstage serves as a central hub where all service-related information can, breaking down silos and making it easier for teams to collaborate and access critical details.

Our implementation of Backstage not only simplifies complex processes but also fosters a culture of accountability, transparency, and excellence across our engineering organisation.

Speakers

Daniel O'Neill

Senior Platform Engineer, Silverflow B.V.

Excited about technology and making an impact. Always striving to bring value to every piece of work I am involved in. Finding joys in working together to a common success.

Tuesday April 1, 2025 17:00 - 17:10 BST
Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

BackstageCon, Lessons learned from standing up + deploying + driving Backstage adoption + etc.

Content Experience Level Intermediate
Event + Breaks BackstageCon

17:15 BST

BackstageCon | Closing Remarks - Balaji Sivasubramanian, Bryan Landes & Blair Fraser, Program Co-Chairs

Tuesday April 1, 2025 17:15 - 17:20 BST

Level 0 | ICC Capital Hall | Room 1

Speakers

BackstageCon

Event + Breaks BackstageCon