See how Red Hat has leveraged CNCF cloud-native projects Backstage and Kubevirt to build an effective developer experience across the organization.

1. 1
Something old, something new,
something borrowed, something Kube
Backstage and
KubeVirt
John Quigley
Solutions Architect
Jason Kincl
Solutions Architect
Michael Quick
Solutions Architect

2. Agenda
● Define the problems being solved
○ Developer Portal
○ Cloud Native Virtualization and Operations
● Backstage origin story
● Define terms and concepts
● Walkthrough of Backstage UI
● KubeVirt origin story
● Walkthrough of KubeVirt
● Show Backstage build and share tips/resources for install
Overview

3. 3
Poll
Show of
○ Who has deployed or logged into a Kubernetes cluster?
○ Who comes from the developer side of the equation?
○ Who comes from the security side of the equation?
○ Who comes from the operations side of the equation?
○ Who knew there were 3 sides to an equation?
○ Who comes from a blended team (e.g. “devops”)?
○ Who is just here for the schwag and snacks?

4. Backstage
Where we are going today
are you on the right flight?
KubeVirt
Virtualization API for Kubernetes Internal Developer Portal

5. Can anyone guess why it’s called Backstage?
Quick Poll

6. Quick Poll

7. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/05/a-product-story-the-lessons-of-backstage-and-spotifys-autonomous-culture/
https://backstage.spotify.com/blog/measuring-backstage-success-at-spotify/
Backstage Origin Story
▸ Spotify in the beginning: few, small, autonomous teams moving quickly
▸ Then came big growth in hiring
▸ Metrics: From hire to 10th PR = 60 days
▸ Survey found problems:
･ Context switching
･ Discoverability
▸ Can’t figure out which module to use? Write your own.
▸ Rumour-driven development

8. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/05/a-product-story-the-lessons-of-backstage-and-spotifys-autonomous-culture/
https://backstage.spotify.com/blog/measuring-backstage-success-at-spotify/
Backstage Origin Story
▸ In the beginning: few, small, autonomous
teams moving quickly
▸ Then came big growth in hiring
▸ Metrics: From hire to 10th PR = 60 days
▸ Survey found problems:
･ Context switching
･ Discoverability
▸ Can’t figure out which module to use?
Write your own.
▸ Rumour-driven development
▸ Centralization without slowing things
down appeared to be the solution
▸ But that would never work in Spotify’s
autonomous culture
▸ Solution: make a platform that they want
to use, but don’t have to
▸ Speed, scale and aligned autonomy
▸ Started in 2016 as internal project
“System Z”
▸ Open sourced in 2020 with CNCF
▸ Metric: now less than 20 days

9. CNCF Status of Backstage
CNCF Accepted
September 8, 2020
Inception
Internal tool in 2016
Open-sourced in 2020
Graduated to Incubating
March 15, 2022
Project Status
Project Progress Over Time

10. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2023/11/spotify-wins-cncf-top-end-user-award-for-the-second-time/
https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2023/11/08/cloud-native-computing-foundation-presents-the-top-end-user-award-to-spotify/
“...in recognition of major end user contributions to
the cloud native ecosystem”
- KubeCon NA Chicago 2023
Backstage:
- 2,250 adopters, > 50% starting in 2023 alone
- over 4,000 evaluating companies
Spotify - impact of Backstage

11. What Problems does Backstage solve?

12. 12
Infinite Tabs
How many open tabs does a developer need
Jira
ArgoCD
Tekton Documentation on
Google Docs
Documentation on
Confluence
Grafana
Topology
View
Sonarqube
Git Repository

13. 13
Onboarding Chaos
Integrating new members efficiently becomes paramount
Development Team

14. 14
Technology Overload
Analysis Paralysis
- too many choices
Sometimes choices
becomes Non-Standard
Development Team
?
or
?
or
Jenkins
Argo
Kafka Artemis
or
Helm Charts
Operator
?

15. 15
Knowledge Fragmentation
Processes are unclear, impacting overall team productivity
Development Team
How do I get
a repo ?
Who can give me
access to ?
Where is the
documentation ?
Is there a list of
existing services ?

16. Backstage core offerings
The Software Catalog: A centralized
directory of everything
TechDocs: Docs-as-code, docs-in-code,
easy to locate.
Search: everything: code, docs, plugins,
templates, systems/components/resources
Golden Path templates: Streamlines the
setup process for new projects, services, or
libraries. Consistency and best practices..
Plugins: Modular extensions that enhance
Backstage with new features or integrate it
with external dev tools and services.

17. Core entities of Backstage
- APIs
- Components
- Resources
=> together make Systems
Some more important terms

18. The Platform
Integrator
The
Contributor
The Software
Engineer
Add functionality by creating
plugins
Uses software templates and plugins to
develop apps
Hosts Backstage and
configures plugins
Backstage Personas

19. Plugin architecture
Frontend vs Backend
Backstage Dashboard

20. 20
Plugins Ecosystem
Extensible and allows to customize the development team needs
More than
150+
community
plugins
Prometheus
GitOps with ArgoCD
SonarQube
Pipelines with Tekton
Jenkins
GitLab
Open Cluster
Management
Application Topology
for Kubernetes
Azure DevOps Jira
Authentication and
Authorization with
Keycloak
Quay Ansible

21. Backstage Plugins
Different tiers
https://github.com/backstage/
community-plugins
Upstream
Community
Red Hat
https://github.com/backstage/b
ackstage/tree/master/plugins
https://janus-idp.io/plugins/
https://github.com/janus-idp/backstage-plugins

22. Backstage Plugins
Different tiers
https://backstage.spotify.com/marketplace

23. Demo in 5, 4, 3, …
But first, a quick note on the design pattern

24. Software
Template as a repo
Software
Template
(“Golden Path”)
GitOps App
Backstage

25. Software Templates
Upstream
Red Hat contributed
https://github.com/backstage/software-templates https://github.com/redhat-developer/red-hat-developer-hub-software-templates

26. https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/operator-manual/cluster-bootstrapping/
ArgoCD “app” installs
and manages your
actual apps
ArgoCD Plugin: App of Apps pattern with GitOps
core concept

27. Demo Time

28. Get Help
Tips & Resources to get started on your KubeVirt & Backstage journey

29. Step ONE: Install NPM
Backstage is at its core a
scaffolded TypeScript
application

30. Plugins
All plugins are NPM modules and are
imported into your application instance with
TypeScript

31. Treat Backstage as its own software
application, track changes with git, and …

32. Install the VSCode plugin
It recognizes your syntax errors!
and it understands the schema!

33. Why?
Maximum flexibility for
integrating Backstage with all
kinds of applications

34. Red Hat’s Community Involvement
● Backstage Plugins
● Validated Software Templates and Actions
● Contributions to Backstage
○ Dynamic Plugins
○ RBAC
○ Helm charts
● Participation at BackstageCon

35. Backstage
community
meetings
Hosted by Spotify
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=c_qup9gbhn9sqpuao6trttd8mk5s@group.calen
dar.google.com

36. Kubevirt
Let's talk VMs!

37. KubeVirt
CNCF Accepted
September 6, 2019
Inception
2016
Graduated to Incubating
April 19, 2022
KubeVirt Status
Project Progress Over Time
17k commits and 1k forks
45 active repositories

38. KubeVirt Project
KubeVirt Razor: "If something is useful for Pods, we should not implement it only for VMs".

39. VM Relevance
Containers are a large part of the future, but VMs aren’t going anywhere.

40. Virtual Machine
▸ CPU: 4 vCPU, 1 core
▸ Memory: 16GB
▸ Disk: 30 GB
▸ OS: RHEL
Additional filesystems
▸ data: 500GB, disk
▸ logs: 100GB, partition
Application platform
▸ JBoss 7.4 Update 11
Firewall rules
▸ Ingress: SSH, HTTPS
▸ Egress: *.redhat.com
DNS & LB
▸ api.service.org
▸ Healthcheck: HTTPS port
Fragmented ‘approach’ to VM provisioning
40
Networking
team
(1-3 days)
Execute workflow
▸ Review & approve
▸ Assign IP & hostname
▸ Configure DNS (host)
Virtualization
team
(1-3 days)
Execute workflow
▸ Review & approve
▸ Queue to networking & storage teams
▸ Create VM from virtualization template and custom parameters
▸ Add disks and partitions and re-configure OS with custom filesystems
▸ Install corporate tools and configure default users and permissions
▸ Queue to platform team
▸ Queue to security team
▸ Queue to networking team
▸ Hand over the VM: IP, credentials and metadata
Security
team
(2-4 days)
Execute workflow
▸ Review & approve
▸ Install security tools
▸ VM hardening
Platform
team
(1-2 days)
Execute workflow
▸ Review & approve
▸ Install JBoss 7.4u11
▸ Configure MW
Networking
team
(2-7 days)
Execute workflow
▸ Review & approve
▸ Configure LB & DNS
▸ Configure FW
Storage
team
(1-2 days)
Execute workflow
▸ Review & approve
▸ Allocate volumes
▸ Whitelist source IP
Request for a
new Virtual
Machine
VM Ready?

41. Next Gen approach to VM provisioning
41
Network Security
Pipeline and automation Storage
Virtual Machine
▸ CPU: 4 vCPU, 1 core
▸ Memory: 16GB
▸ Disk: 30 GB
▸ OS: RHEL
Additional filesystems
▸ data: 500GB, disk
▸ logs: 100GB, partition
Application platform
▸ JBoss 7.4 Update 11
Firewall rules
▸ Ingress: SSH, HTTPS
▸ Egress: *.redhat.com
DNS & LB
▸ api.service.org
▸ Healthcheck: HTTPS port
Request for a
new Virtual
Machine
VM Ready?
Ansible Tekton
Pipelines
K8s or OKD
A process that can be optimized down to a few minutes
cloud-init
VM template VM image
KubeVirt
Automate VM
image builds &
updates
Automatically
deploy VMs from
code (Git repos)
Manage networks,
storage, load
balancers, etc.

42. KubeVirt
Traditional Virtualization vs KubeVirt
❏ Configure OpenShift
❏ Create Configurations
❏ Apply Configurations
❏ Setup Networking
❏ Setup DNS
❏ Setup Load Balancer
❏ Setup Secrets Management
❏ Setup Configuration Management
❏ Setup Storage
❏ Setup Firewall
❏ Download OS
❏ Create VM (directly or via template)
❏ Start VM
❏ Configure Networking
❏ Configure Storage
❏ Configure Memory
Creating KubeVirt VMs
Creating Traditional VMs
❏ Patch Operating System
❏ Setup Access
❏ Connect to VM
❏ Harden the VM
❏ Install Dependencies
❏ Deploy Workload
❏ Setup CI/CD pipeline
❏ Setup Automation
❏ Configure Application
❏ Setup Backup
❏ Setup Monitoring
❏ Setup Logging
❏ Setup Metrics

43. KubeVirt
VMs in Pipelines
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/running-vms-the-cloud-native-way
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/creating-a-golden-image-for-windows-vms-in-openshift-virtualization

44. apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: PipelineRun
metadata:
generateName: windows10-customize-run-
labels:
pipelinerun: windows10-customize-run
spec:
params:
- name: allowReplaceGoldenTemplate
value: true
- name: allowReplaceCustomizationTemplate
value: true
pipelineRef:
name: windows10-customize
taskRunSpecs:
- pipelineTaskName: copy-template-customize
taskServiceAccountName: copy-template-task
- pipelineTaskName: modify-vm-template-customize
taskServiceAccountName: modify-vm-template-task
- pipelineTaskName: create-vm-from-template
taskServiceAccountName: create-vm-from-template-task
- pipelineTaskName: wait-for-vmi-status
taskServiceAccountName: wait-for-vmi-status-task
- pipelineTaskName: create-base-dv
taskServiceAccountName: modify-data-object-task
- pipelineTaskName: cleanup-vm
taskServiceAccountName: cleanup-vm-task
- pipelineTaskName: copy-template-golden
taskServiceAccountName: copy-template-task
- pipelineTaskName: modify-vm-template-golden
taskServiceAccountName: modify-vm-template-task
status: {}

45. KubeVirt
● One platform, one skillset
● K8s native for all workloads
● Democratizing dev & ops
Automation and
Self Service
Unified Ops and
Ecosystem
Scalability and
Resource Utilization
● VM Scalability
● Dynamically provision VMs
● Automated Deployments
● Backstage
● ServiceNow
● Automated w/ Pipelines,
Sysprep/Cloud-init, or Ansible
KubeVirt Virtual Machines
KVM with spinning rims

46. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/powering-geforce-now-with-kubevirt-from-openshift-commons-gathering-amsterdam-2023
KubeVirt Installation
KubeVirt in the Wild - Nvidia GeForce

47. How to Install on k8s
KubeVirt
Mailing List
https://groups.google.com/for
um/#!forum/kubevirt-dev
kubevirt.io
https://kubernetes.slack.com/
messages/virtualization
KubeVirt Website Join the Slack Community
KubeVirt Community Resources
Community Resources
https://kubevirt.io/videos/
https://kubevirt.io/labs/kubernetes/
lab1.html

48. Connect with us!

49. linkedin.com/company/red-hat
youtube.com/user/RedHatVideos
facebook.com/redhatinc
twitter.com/RedHat
49
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