KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025 | Valentina Rodriguez Sosa & Balaji Sivasubramanian, Red Hat

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Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Openshift

Red Hat

Balaji Sivasubramanian

Head of Product Management

Red Hat

play_circle_outline BackstageCon and platform engineering discussed

play_circle_outline Use cases for data scientists and AI

play_circle_outline Backstage as AI teammate, simplifying tasks

play_circle_outline Future goals: more AI, ROI impact, supportal for personas

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Valentina Rodriguez Sosa & Balaji Sivasubramanian, Red Hat

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Openshift Red Hat

Balaji Sivasubramanian

Head of Product Management Red Hat

Exploring BackstageCon's Impact on Platform Engineering at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2025

Join Valentina Rodriguez Sosa, Red Hat's platform engineering lead, and Balaji Sivasubramanian, a senior solutions architect, as they explore the world of BackstageCon at the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2025 event.

In this engaging video, renowned hosts Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechey from theCUBE explore the crucial role of Backstage and Developer Hub within Red Hat's ecosystem. Insights from Rodriguez Sosa and Sivasubramanian focus on elevating platform ... Read more

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What are some of the things that the person thought about during the BackstageCon event that really translate, especially in regards to the developer hub implementation? add

What are some of the ways in which portals can be used to facilitate AI use cases and workflows, particularly for data scientists and AI engineers? add

What are the current developments in AI for developers and how are they being implemented and curated in terms of tools and technology? add

What do you hope to be able to say, when we are at KubeCon and BackstageCon next year in Amsterdam, that you can't yet say today? add

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Valentina Rodriguez Sosa & Balaji Sivasubramanian, Red Hat

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, nerd fam, and welcome back to surprisingly sunny London, England. We're here midway through day two of our three days of coverage on theCUBE at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by the infamous Rob Strechey. Rob, you're excited about this one. I can tell.

Rob Strechay

>> I am. This is one of my favorite topics and I got to spend some time with it the other day, so I am ready to roll.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well then, let's roll right on into our fabulous guests. First of all, Valentina, welcome to the stage.

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> Thank you so much.

Savannah Peterson

>> Happy to have you. And Balaji, this is becoming a tradition for us. I think this is at least our fifth at this point. We love having you on.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> Thank you very much. Yeah. Good to be here. You are the two favorite people of mine.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, well thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> We paid him to say that, folks, don't worry.

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> I know. He told me.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, the money's in the mail.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually right under the newsdesk. No, I'm kidding. You've already had a very busy week. You're at BackstageCon. We always check in around these events and what's going on with Backstage. Give me the latest. How's that evolving?

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> Yeah, Backstage is really thriving. I think, Rob, you mentioned you were there.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> 400 people or so. It's great to see in Europe. It's a second event there. It's great. This is the fifth BackstageCon actually-

Savannah Peterson

>> Nice.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> So that's great. Fifth year anniversary for Backstage. This is really great stuff. And the number of adoption is great. 3,400 enterprises are adopting it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow. That's awesome.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> A lot of people are on the stage talking about their success stories, so it's great stuff.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, and it was even beyond just Spotify being there and stuff. You guys were there and there was a lot of really good end users, I thought, you guys... Because you're one of the co-chairs of the day and stuff like that. When you looked at that, what was some of the things that you thought there that really translate? Because you have developer hub and that's your implementation of Backstage within the Red Hat ecosystem. What did you think, in that day and over the course of yesterday, that you heard that was really energizing about that?

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> Yeah, Red Hat is actually number two contributor to the Backstage project, so we are very proud of that and we want to continue to do that. You talked about Developer Hub. We launched it last year, basically January of last year. Great success, lots of customers. I think, in the previous November event, we did a press release, 25,000 plus developers and growing, which is great. And we think that this is a very important part of our platform story. If you look at the Backstage adoption itself, it had 67% market share of all of them, including the homegrown. If you look at SaaS vendors who are doing... Lots of IDP vendors here, but Backstage is actually 67% market share, which is pretty good. We are pretty excited about contributing to it, as well as bringing enterprise use cases for Backstage.

Savannah Peterson

>> Digging in a little bit on those use cases, I know you mentioned Shopify, but Valentina, I'd love to hear some of the other use cases you can share with us.

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> Yeah. No, of course. One of the things that I'm very passionate about is platform engineering. The whole idea, you probably hear a lot about platform engineering, but one of the things I love most is self-service because, if you think about technology, the whole idea is to really help business resolve problems. We always think this is super cool, but how actually we can help the organizations by removing blockers and also help advance software development. I was a developer a long time ago, so I'm very passionate about the Developer Hub, but also, if you think about self-service, is how you enable those personas and those personas could be anyone, like developers, a data scientist, anyone who needs to interact with the platform, and it could be anything. We think, most of the time, on applications, what about if you need to access an ephemeral environment or just a namespace or install a database or just do specific configurations. When we work with organizations, sometimes they do have their policies, they need their guidelines, so how we can put all of that in software templates, so we can scale. This is also an interesting point that I usually talk with platform engineers. This will help you scale your knowledge, take that complexity into best practices to help the organization grow. Because at some point, how many developers you can serve? The idea is really helping with those scalability and best practices. Yeah, it's just one of my favorite things to talk about.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> I was going say, the portals, for example, Backstage makes it an easy button for the platform. Essentially you can ask the developers to do best practices and security best practices. You can say shift left, in terms of security best practices, but having 10,000 developers do it consistently over time is impossible. With the platform engineering approach or the templates approach, you're basically shifting down. Instead of shifting left, you're shifting down, so the platform becomes automatic for developers. Developers say, you know what? You want me to develop an application? And they ask for this self-service and security is already embedded in the workflow. That's why self-service is key. Templates is key. Yeah, I think we think it's a... Backstage or the internal developer portal is really becoming a key part of delivering the platforms.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I think, to me, I had this epiphany two weeks ago, and I was talking about it earlier, that a whole shift left... When I had developers working for me, they hated the words shift left because that meant, oh, security doesn't have to do this, but I have to do this now. And they're like, what, you're saying my code's insecure and I'm building bad code? And I'm like, no, that's not what we're talking about. I think why I like Backstage so much is it's "meet in the middle," to your point. Here's the templates, here's the tools. Do you see a lot of people with Backstage and Developer Hub really linking in, where... To your point, because you brought up another persona that's not regularly heard of with Backstage, which is data scientists. Data scientists want to get at the data. They don't want to deal with where is the data living or all of these intricacies. They want to just get at the data, figure out how to use it and things of that nature. That seems, to me, to be one of these places. It's becoming a meeting place that platform engineering can put that out there.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> Yeah, I think the portals can essentially serve a lot of use cases, right? AI use cases, AI workflow. Our AI engineers are discovering models and learning about the models and being able to deploy applications quickly. Those things. We are talking about model catalogs, so developers essentially can see what models my enterprise is serving and be able to see that, get an API key, and use it in their application. It becomes a central point for a lot of use cases. Maybe you can talk about the ML use case if you want.

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> Yeah, absolutely. If you think about the data scientists, you want to think about also production and all the steps they need to take. And also as an organization, you need to set up all the best practices, like how much resources they will consume, the security guard address, what are the tools they need. If you start thinking maybe, right now, you have a few data scientists, but then it's growing, it's growing, and you will have hundreds of thousands, how you can ensure it's the same thing as developers, that the best practices are in place, that everyone is accessing the resources that they need. The idea is enable all those personas, but also removing as much of the steps as you can and putting all of those into the software templates so they can easily access and everything. They can just focus on training and building their model and have all the tools they need. That's basically it. It is really easy, so that's one of the things I like, especially about Developer Hub, because you can really help people on their daily jobs and reduce that time back, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Reduce that timeline, reduce that cognitive load, and really enhance the user experience to a place where people feel enabled and empowered building rather than getting stuck in the clunk that happens sometimes when you're rolling out stuff, especially when we're talking about things that are super complex like AI. Balaji, I know this is a hot topic, you and I have talked about it now for a few years. We're early on the curve compared to everybody else right now.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> We are projecting what you can do back then, right? A couple of years ago.

Savannah Peterson

>> We really were, yeah. No kidding. Let's talk about how y'all are thinking about AI for the developer and how you're building and pulling together and curating, really, the right tools.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> This requires an hour of talk, but I'll just give you a quick taste from a portal perspective, because the AI is a pretty big topic. I'm super excited about it. Number one, definitely, almost like... Somebody was telling, getting answers in a chat format is almost like 2023, right? Okay, understood, we have a rag model, you get the data from something and then answer. Now, it's all about agentic. We are really excited about MCP, model context protocol, and how everybody's implementing model servers. Essentially, there's going to be a model server for Backstage itself. Somebody can query Backstage and say, what are the catalog items that serve this? Backstage will start becoming a tool for somebody else who's doing it. And we can imagine, this is what I'm hoping to get, is a portal essentially is not just a chatbot or whatever it is, actually... Think of it as a cursor, right? If it's a cursor, you can ask certain things. Here I can say, hey, I want to create a new application which is Python based, blah, blah, blah. Can you do all of that for me? It actually knows what is the context of it. That's one use case. Another use case is that, if I'm troubleshooting something, if I'm asking a question, what is the latest version of something or why is this not working? Just the name of the application. It should know where to look for it. Hey, OpenShift, where is my application? What cluster? What parts? Who's monitoring the part? Okay, let me talk to Datadog and get that information and then curate the data and troubleshoot it. In a way, I guess a portal will become an AI teammate-

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely....

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> rather than just a collection of information for you to click on.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. To me, that's exactly what I was talking about. Where, again, to your point, I got to go to a few of the days. I went to platform engineering day. That was pretty heavily attended as well, not as well attended as Backstage day. But when you started to look at it, I think people are trying to figure out how to service new personas. And I think, when we were at platform engineering day, a lot of the discussion was not about the tech stack, per se, it was about the people and the processes that get implemented. Is that where you see Backstage coming in, and Developer Hub, is really growing beyond, like you're talking about, growing and being that... Because I look at platform engineering as the new name for IT because nobody wants to be a storage admin and network admin, a server admin, just a Kubernetes admin. They're more or less full stack now and then they have some amount of developer type thing. Is that what you're seeing?

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> Yeah, exactly. Because I think with everything that's going on with AI, every day there is something new, and technology is evolving so rapidly. How we can enable all those personas that, if you want to enable everyone to start building AI, if you want to help those platform engineers to enable all those data scientists, all those developers, how we can do it in a way that really removes all that complexity, that cognitive load that we were talking? It's just putting best practices. That's a great thing because sometimes organizations struggle to how I can ensure everyone is including, like security we talk about, right? Everyone is implementing security in the right way. How we can ensure that the documentation is up-to-date? If you have one source of truth that also, behind the scenes, to get more technical, is like the Jira's approach, which ensures that the actual state is the same as cyber state, so nothing gets lost. It's a really great approach, from the start to the end, that really serves everyone. And when we were talking about AI, we are also having some templates that you can start. Developers can start learning if they don't know, okay, how I can build a chatbot? What are the things they can do? They can start learning and consuming. They will probably adapt it, but it's a starting point. And for data scientists, the other thing I want to say, is we can do many things, like enabling them with, I don't know, just stepping up a workbench with everything they need with the storage and everything they need. How easy is that? It's just click a button, everything is done and you can just focus. I think, moving on, we want to reduce that cognitive load and enable people moving forward and help them innovate, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Help them do more, faster, better with a smile on their face as they're doing it, because why not have some fun while we're all out here?

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> Developer joy, right? You want developer joy.

Rob Strechay

>> There you go.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, definitely. What are you going to tackle next?

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> This part, as we talked about the AI, that is a pretty good story to enable. It's a very highly evolving space, right? Every day there's new technologies coming. But I totally see that the portal could become the AI teammate for-

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. I'm going to appropriate that from you. I'm going to just borrow that intellectual thought. Because it makes so much sense, honestly.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> because there's all the context, right? Because it has all the plugins. We have 300 plugins and maybe custom plugins. It has all the context. I can give the context to the AI to free people to do all of those things. That's one big trend. The other thing is even... That's great, but the thing is getting customers on onboarded is a big challenge. Somebody was just asking me, basically before this, hey, I get it, it's a blank space. Where do I start? I think that is a lot of effort we're putting in terms of getting it from a brownfield. Let's say you have already hundreds of applications, how do we get on board it? How do I get those templates quickly generated? Maybe using AI to generate some of these templates, right? That part, unless you get that, it's going to be difficult for people to enjoy the whole experience. That's something a big focus area for us, is how do you get that day zero day in use case and then obviously add on the AI to turbocharge it.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that you focus so much on that very beginning of the journey because that's when it's scariest, that's when it's perhaps most expensive, that's when you have the most anxiety about the tool curation and stack that you're developing. There's so many different things in that very initial phase. It's like the first time you try a new sport, you're super awkward and not very sure of yourself. And then, over time, with friends and partners like you guys, and frankly the entire open source community, you can really build a lot. Okay, last question for you, and I'm super curious. I might have asked you this one before, Balaji, but we'll have to go back and review the footage. What do you hope to be able to say, when we are at KubeCon and BackstageCon next year in Amsterdam, that you can't yet say today?

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> All right, you did ask me last time and I said AI. Now I'm saying more AI. I definitely feel like... Whatever the vision I talked about, the AI teammate vision, I want to be able to be further ahead in that roadmap, right? I think that's, for me... I really think that there's going to be, in the future or even now, there's going to be a set of people who is going to use AI and somebody who's not going to use AI. That AI person will be 10x the user. We don't want to be left behind on the AI front, so we definitely think that, with the portal approach, because it touches every developer, I think we hope to have a big impact. That would be what... Hopefully we can get into more specific details. Hey, we launched this and here's what you can do.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I want more of those case studies and use cases and stories of ROI achieved and also impact achieved, right? It's not just about the money, it's about the cool things we can do.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> And one quick ROI thing is one of the large bank that they use, self-service use case, they reduced their operational experience by 98%. They were using 15,000 Jira tickets for all the platform related activities from... This is real data. Per month. 15,000 per month. Tickets per month. And they reduced by 98% because they can just fully offload. That's the power of self-service. But I want to do more.

Savannah Peterson

>> Always. I know that with you. Never satisfied, always pushing. More AI too. What about you Valentina?

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> Yeah. My thought is we need to see a supportal. A portal to innovate, a portal to remove blockers. We need to start revisiting the personas because, with AI, we have AI engineers, we have data scientists and then operations. How we enable all those personas, through the developer portal, really, to facilitate, enable AI. I would like to see more of that, really.

Savannah Peterson

>> More, more.

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> More, more, more. Yes, yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. I cannot wait to hear more about it with you all next year, and hopefully also in Atlanta. Valentina and Balaji. Such a pleasure.

Balaji Sivasubramanian

>> Thank you very much.

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> It was. Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> I really appreciate it. And Sue wasn't kidding, you do have energy that rivals mine, which is a truly remarkable feat for most humans.

Valentina Rodriguez Sosa

>> Ah, thank you. Such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. And thank you, Rob. Always a joy.

Rob Strechay

>> I love it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Bringing that co-host, co-analyst joy here today, just like they bring the developer joy.

Rob Strechay

>> Exactly.

Savannah Peterson

>> I hope you're all having a wonderful joy-filled day, wherever you might be. We're here in London, England at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.