KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025 | Zohar Einy, Port

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Zohar Einy

Co-Founder & CEO

Port

play_circle_outline Comparing Backstage and Port.io: A Guide to Choosing the Right Developer Portal Solution

play_circle_outline Customer use cases: GitHub

play_circle_outline Developer portal: solving collaboration issues

play_circle_outline Balancing Guardrails and Freedom: The Impact of AI on the Future of Platform Engineering

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Zohar Einy, Port

Zohar Einy

Co-Founder & CEO Port

In this episode, we join Zohar Einy, CEO of Port.io, at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2025 in London. The discussion explores the evolution of developer portals and how they transform the developer experience. KubeCon+CloudNativeCon serves as a key event for the cloud-native and open-source communities, bringing together innovators and thought leaders globally.

Einy, an experienced software engineer and the current CEO of Port.io, shares insights on the changing landscape of developer responsibilities. With hosts from theCUBE Research, the discussion explo... Read more

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What are the differences between Backstage and Port in terms of developing a developer portal for an organization? add

What is one use case of developers' responsibilities within an organization, such as GitHub, that are using Port as part of their engineering practices? add

What steps are typically taken to identify and address the friction points within an organization when implementing a developer portal? add

What are some of the concerns that CIOs and CTOs have regarding the adoption of gen AI tools by developers in organizations? add

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Zohar Einy, Port

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Rob Strechay

>> Hello and welcome back to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon London 2025. Rob Strechay here breaking some stuff down. It's day three, we're getting through, and today the focus is really on development and the developers and how to make their lives easier, how to really address that persona. And I'm really excited to bring on Zohar Einy, who's with the CEO of Port.io to kind of help us talk through a lot of what's going on in the developer ecosystem and how Port is really looking to aim to help them. So welcome on board. And first off, why don't you give the audience a little bit of an idea of what Port.io is up to and how it started and where you're at now.

Zohar Einy

>> Absolutely. So first of all, I am a big fan of theCUBE, so happy to be here as a guest today.

Rob Strechay

>> Thank you.

Zohar Einy

>> So a little bit about myself, so I started my journey as a developer, as an engineer. And as time goes by, developers are not just coding anymore, they are writing code, they are managing incidents, they're taking care of security issues, they're provisioning cloud resources. They do so many things. And in a way, as a developer, I had to reach out to DevOps for every little thing that I needed and to file a ticket. And my co-founder, Yonatan, he's the CTO, he was the one that got my tickets and I had to wait for weeks to get something done. And Yonatan got assigned to solve this problem and he started a department called America for an enterprise we worked for. And America changed my life because I was able, instead of creating a ticket, I was able to go to America, click a button and get a microservice provisioned or a cloud resource provisioned. And then we realized that every company will need a developer portal at some point. When we started, no one knew what it is, but today it's a practice that is being adopted worldwide. So this is a little bit about what got us excited to starting Port in the end. Happy to be here today.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I think again, both of us have backgrounds in that and it's always been a challenge. I mean, I haven't actually been a developer in over 30 years, but that's a different story. But I had developers working on my teams at multiple different, and I think that is, how do you keep speed and velocity up and reduce friction, make it easier so it's also templated out? What Port.io is up to is similar to what Backstage is. Why don't you juxtapose what Backstage and Port.io are doing so people understand what's going on there?

Zohar Einy

>> Yeah. So Backstage is an amazing open source project, which provides a framework to develop a developer portal, which requires coding and maintaining by a team. And Port is a commercial solution, it's a SaaS product, which strikes the balance between flexibility because every company's a snowflake, every company has their own DNA. And the ease of use. So we give you a simple building blocks that you can use in order to create a developer portal for your organization. So this is how Port and Backstage can be thought about to one another.

Rob Strechay

>> You were saying earlier, there's some places where Backstage is really good and some places where Port is really better, help people understand that.

Zohar Einy

>> Yeah, so it really depends on the profile of the company. Some people in some companies in their nature, they prefer to build things, which is great. They would set up a team, they would bring front-end engineers, product managers, designers to the team and set up an amazing backstage instance. But some companies prefer to focus on the business logic and they would prefer to buy a SaaS solution or an alternative that they can actually buy and maintain a small team that will operate it. And this is really where Port will fit to companies that prefer to buy and Backstage would be good for companies that prefer to build.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, makes total sense. So what are some interesting customer use cases? You have some customers that are really diving in with Port.io. Give us some ideas of where that has fit in with some of your customers.

Zohar Einy

>> Yeah, absolutely. So one of our customers is GitHub. GitHub are using Port and are adopting Port as part of their engineering practices. And part of what they wanted to ensure is that all the standards of development are being met by the developers so that security teams can set their standards and make sure that developers are following it and SREs can make sure that developers are following the quality standards. And developers has a simple way to find a way around and comply with the standards by the organization and the different departments. So this would be one use case of the developer's responsibility among many other responsibilities that developers has to end with.

Rob Strechay

>> Why I find that one that story interesting is because I mean, they're a large company. I mean, were part of a large company from that perspective, and when you start to look at it, they have a lot of developers. So doing Backstage would be probably pretty simple. What was the thing that drove them to Port.io though?

Zohar Einy

>> Yeah, so I think that to GitHub specifically and to more customers that we see in general, what we see is that some companies are building something. They started a journey before, even before, when America started, before there was a thing. And what happens is once you launch the developer portal, developers are starting to use it, but very often more and more stakeholders wants to be part of it, like the security teams, the product teams, the SREs, the managers. So the developer portal needs to keep up with the pace of the business requirement and needs to be future-proof to what the business needs because it's changing and evolving. So what get customers like GitHub and other customers to think about Port is they wanted solution that can fit into their DNA to their tech stack, to their processes, but can also evolve and grow its offering to most stakeholders inside the organization as it's becoming an org-wide solution rather than just a tool for the developers.

Rob Strechay

>> So you hit on a couple things there that I think are really interesting and it was the different personas that you have to be able to service and Port.io is looking to service and you either have to build it in or buy it, and there's always that challenge. Where do you see, because I think what's really interesting about this is platform engineering has been one of the big topics. I think we're finally starting to see most organizations really rebrand IT and DevOps and bring them together and SREs together in platform engineering. Where do you see the future of platform engineering going?

Zohar Einy

>> Yeah, I think that platform engineering grew from the complexity of modern cloud-native environment. If we look at this amazing KubeCon, there are so many tools, so many processes that developers needs to know and to handle in their day-to-day life. And I think that what happens now when we have AI is helping developers to develop more code, so creating more software becomes more easy. It means you have more microservices, more packages, and therefore more incidents, more bugs, more vulnerabilities. So the chaos now grows exponentially. So I think that the way we see this market is growing is that if you adopt AI tools, you are growing the chaos and you need to balance it with standards and governance and making sure that everyone speaks the same language, which I believe makes platform engineering crucial, mandatory for adopting gen AI tools as part of your software development.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. So we'll go there in a second, we'll go to the AI thing in a second. But I think one of the things I'm interested in is you are, like you said, you're addressing a lot of different personas. How have you made that easy for companies? Because like you said, me being a product person, I want to be able to see what's happening and understand where we are in a development process so that if we're doing releases a couple times a week or something of that nature, or at least once a week and doing pushing, I have an idea of what's going on and there's lots of different tools to go and do that. How are you helping organizations really come together? I call it, because I had an epiphany a couple weeks ago that I hate the word shift left with security. So I kind of call it meet in the middle, and I look at these portals as the place to meet and meet in the middle because like you said, for the persona of the security person, they can go in and template out so it's always consistent. It's always, here's the packages we use, here's the different things that are approved. We know these don't have CVEs in them, things of that. How are you seeing all these personas and how do you help those organizations build to that, to those different personas?

Zohar Einy

>> So the way that we start is by identifying the friction points for the organization, because a developer portal is a very wide solution. It solves pains for many stakeholders inside the organization. So before we begin with customers, we will measure different metrics like DORA metrics to identify what are the issues? Is it deployment frequency? Is it ? Is it SLA for vulnerabilities? And we will also conduct surveys to ask developers what are their pain points today? And then we would focus on the low-hanging fruits for what are the most painful things, and we will start from there. And then what happens is once developers are starting to adopt the tool for the upcoming few use cases, then we see other teams saying, "We want to be where developers are and we want to be where the data is." Because everything starts to consolidate. And to your point, I think that what a developer portal solves is actually a collaboration problem between different teams, making sure that everyone's aligned and also makes every stakeholder and every team autonomous at the same time. So developer portal does not solve a technological problem, it solves people's problem.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, and that was a big thing. I was in Platform Engineering Day back on Tuesday, it feels like a week ago now after this entire week. It's been so intense. And that was a big theme that was going on. It was not about the technology, it was about the people aspect of it and thing, because now we'll shift back because I think this is where this also hits some of the technology. What do you see as the impact of AI on platform engineering? Because to me it's really intriguing and I think it could have some significant benefits to organizations.

Zohar Einy

>> So what we see right now with organizations is that developers are adopting gen AI tools. It's not a question. They're using Cursor, they're using GitHub Copilot. This is a reality and we see more and more tools are being out there and adopted by the ecosystem of engineers. And then when we speak to CIOs and CTOs, they're concerned about what would be the impact of those tools. So of course they want to realize the positive impact, they want to see that they have better deployment frequency, they release more features more frequently, and they're able to meet the market faster. But it does not come for free. They realize that software has tax. You have to understand the number of incidents and the explainability of the code because you didn't write a code your own and developers, it takes more time to realize the root cause of an issue because who wrote this code? And I'm not familiar with this function with vibe coding going on. So you want to make sure that once you use those tools, platform engineering is the answer to set the guardrails and make sure that everyone are staying within the boundaries of the business because security, quality, compliance is not going anywhere.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think you hit on it pretty nicely there. I think the guardrails aspect of it is really key because I think it's the balance between guardrails versus really just these are the only things because I'm very interested in this. When organizations are putting their templates together, do they allow some degrees of freedom in those templates? Because I've seen it that way, but I don't know what you're seeing from as standard operating procedure for these organizations. They give, here's the three packages that could do this. Here's these so that they can work within the tooling that they know already.

Zohar Einy

>> Yes. The secret is to create a level of abstraction that gives enough freedom to the developers to provision a cloud resource the way that they want, but instead of completing 30 different inputs, they would get just those three or four inputs they really care about. They don't need more than that. They don't want to handle with more than that. If they need something, it's an edge case and can be taken care of, but you need to find the right balance of abstraction to give developers to choose and to not worry so much about all the different configurations of AWS just in this specific example.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, that makes total sense. I think for me, those degrees of freedom are the big thing. So final question to you, when we're sitting together in Amsterdam a year from now, what do you hope that you can say that you can't say today about where Port.io is in a year? You don't have to be specific about features or anything like that, but where do you hope that you've gotten the company to in the next year?

Zohar Einy

>> I think DevOps promised us agility at the first idea of it. And platform engineering is the very missing piece of making developers truly self-sufficient and autonomous. And we are not there yet. And I want to be able to say one year from now that the industry of software managed to make developers truly self-sufficient. And we are all waiting for it, but we are getting there.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think that's a great way. Because I think, again, there's so much friction right now and AI is definitely making certain things better faster, but it's also putting friction into where they're building these applications that are based on agents and things like that. So totally fun.

Zohar Einy

>> Absolutely. And to your point, coding is just like 20% of the developer's actual day-to-day activity. There are like 80% of things that they need help with.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I agree. Zohar, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate. This has been a fun time. We'll have to see you on here again.

Zohar Einy

>> Absolutely. Thank you for having me today.

Rob Strechay

>> And thank you for watching this episode of Cloud, well, I almost went CloudNativeCon + KubeCon which is what I think it's turning into, but it's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon from London 2025. We're here still pumping out the news. We'll be back with you shortly on theCUBE, the leader in tech news and analysis. See you soon.