Service Mesh Academy

Building a Secure, Reliable, Observable IDP with Backstage and Linkerd

Thursday, October 17, 2024
9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET

Microservices applications are at the heart of cloud native, but they can be hard to work with. You need the security, reliability, and observability offered by a service mesh — and as your application grows and becomes more complex — you also need the kind of information and visibility offered by an internal developer platform (IDP). Historically, we've tended to approach these as completely different tools...but what if they can work together?

It turns out that giving the IDP direct access to all the critical information that the mesh already knows is a game-changer. Join us to see how Backstage and Linkerd can join forces to bring the depth of Linkerd's dynamic metrics to Backstage's single-pane-of-glass visibility into the application! We'll be demoing the newly available Linkerd plugin for Backstage, showing off how to get the most from both tools and discussing plans for the future.

What you'll get out of this
  • Learn how the new Linkerd plugin for Backstage provides integrated visibility
  • See how easy it is to add security, reliability, and observability to your Backstage-powered IDP
  • Understand why adding a service mesh to your IDP is a no-brainer
Register for the workshop
Getting Ready

This is a hands-on workshop, so it’s important that you arrive prepared with a Kubernetes cluster and the Linkerd CLI installed on your machine! I'll use the latest edge release. Check out the Edge Getting Started Guide for specific instructions on how to set that up. (If you don’t want to do the hands-on portion, you are welcome to just listen in. But it won’t be as fun!)

Speakers
Ben Lambert
Ben Lambert
,
Senior Engineer @ Spotify and Maintainer of Backstage

Ben is a Senior Engineer at Spotify, where he spends most of his time working on Backstage, the Open Source framework for building Developer Portals originally developed internally at Spotify. Ben's deep-rooted passion for modern software engineering is evident in his contributions to Backstage and his unwavering commitment to fostering a thriving developer community. In addition to his work at Spotify, Ben actively shares his expertise and experiences with Backstage and modern software engineering practices at industry events and conferences like KubeCon.

Flynn
Flynn
,
Tech Evangelist

Flynn is a tech evangelist at Buoyant, where he works on spreading the good word about Linkerd — the graduated CNCF service mesh that makes the fundamental tools for software security and reliability freely available to every engineer — and about Kubernetes and cloud-native development in general. Flynn is also the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway, also a CNCF project.

Flynn's career in computing spans nearly forty years and runs the gamut from bringup on bare metal to distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout. He has spoken about Linkerd, Emissary-ingress, and other cloud native technologies at several conferences, including KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, DevOps Days, and the NYC Kubernetes meetup.