KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 | Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF & Tyson Singer, Spotify

Clips
More from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026

Chris Aniszczyk

CTO

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Tyson Singer

Head of Technology & Platforms

Spotify

play_circle_outline Backstage adoption: thousands of companies, visible adopters like LEGO and American Airlines

play_circle_outline Backstage IDP, Plugins, and AiKA Agents: Reducing Developer Cognitive Load in Complex Tech Ecosystems

play_circle_outline Measured impact: Backstage reduced squad guardrail workload (goalie) by about 47% at Spotify

play_circle_outline Fleet management: Honk agentic fleet management with Soundcheck quality checks for safe mass changes

Info
Transcript

Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF & Tyson Singer, Spotify

Chris Aniszczyk

CTO Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Tyson Singer

Head of Technology & Platforms Spotify

In this interview from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Amsterdam, Tyson Singer, senior vice president and head of technology and platforms at Spotify, joins Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer of CNCF, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay about how Backstage is evolving from a developer portal into the essential connective layer for agentic AI workflows. Singer describes how Spotify now exposes hundreds of Backstage plugins to AI agents through an MCP service called AiKA, one of the company's most-used agent interfaces. He highlights a ... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

How widely has Backstage been adopted, and which companies use it? add

What is helping bring Backstage (the developer portal) into the age of AI? add

How does using Backstage and its associated systems change developers' day-to-day work and workflows? add

How does the Backstage ecosystem support fleet-wide code changes and reduce pull-request review burden while ensuring safety, quality, and security? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF & Tyson Singer, Spotify

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU, live in Amsterdam. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE. What was on your Spotify Wrapped list last year?

Rob Strechay

>> That's a great question. It was a lot of heavy metal.

Rebecca Knight

>> All right. Okay.

Tyson Singer

>> Very nice.

Rob Strechay

>> Let's put it this way, '80s and '90s rock to put it mildly. Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. Well, we've got Spotify here on theCUBE, which I'm very excited about. I'd like to introduce Tyson Singer, head of technology and platforms, SVP at Spotify. Welcome, Tyson.

Tyson Singer

>> Thank you. Glad to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> Awesome. Happy to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes. And it's not every day we have a celebrity in our midst. You are in a documentary that is dropping today.

Tyson Singer

>> That's right.

Rebecca Knight

>> The film celebrates platform engineering teams, developers, and cloud-native practitioners. They don't get a lot of movies about them.

Tyson Singer

>> We're not in a lot of movies-

Rebecca Knight

>> I know. I know.

Tyson Singer

>> So, big thanks to the CNCF for working with everybody in the Backstage community to put this together. And it's a fun story. There's ups and downs.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. So, tell us about it.

Tyson Singer

>> It's not an easy journey. Yeah. Well, there's a whole documentary. I really do want people to go and see that.

Rebecca Knight

>> We don't want to spoil that that, but tell us about Backstage.

Tyson Singer

>> But definitely a story from where we started just basically with a bunch of spreadsheets to a robust platform for platform engineering, where we are today and that's the journey that we take you through. It's really done well inside of the context of the CNCF wrapper and as a project.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> Yeah. I appreciate all y'all giving us the time to go film and tell the story. We've done these documentaries for Kubernetes, Prometheus, and now Backstage. It's great to understand where the technology came from, what problems we're solving, where the engineer is involved, and where it is being used today. Backstage, you book an airline... It's used by all these companies to run their internal platform engineering efforts. It's probably, last I checked 3,000, 4,000, at least adopted, maybe even more that haven't been public about it, but it is wild. You go to the Backstage GitHub repo, they have little adopters, that markdown file, and you just see LEGO, and like, "Cool, I had no idea LEGO was using Backstage. Awesome. American Airlines. Cool, I had no idea either." Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, it is basically the de facto platform for developers and their portal and where they go to simplify a lot of that. And I think, again, as you look at where it is today and where it's going into the future, what do you think, again, is helping bring that into the age of AI? Because I think to me, that's one of the things is I don't want to see people reinventing the wheel just because there's yet a new workload going out there and stuff.

Tyson Singer

>> Yeah. So, we started it with the idea to solve basically two problems, like chaos in the engineering ecosystem and cognitive load. And both of those, they're amplified in the new AI age, where the developer really does have to understand more context because they can, because their agents can help them work on more things and they have to manage more things concurrently. And you've got this agentic workforce that really needs to know what the standards and the guidelines are for your development ecosystem. And so, having a place where you can take all of that, like a single surface which is not just for people, but for agents as well, and ingest that across all the complexities. So, we've got a few hundred different plugins into the Backstage ecosystem. And then, we expose that to the agentic ecosystem through our AI chatbot and our MCP service, which is called AiKA. And that is at Spotify, at least, one of the most-used MCP services in the company. And so, you see the agents are really benefiting from all this human-defined knowledge across all of our domains and all the surfaces that Backstage allows you to cover to manage that cognitive load and, of course, the complexity in your tech ecosystem.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> I think maybe Tyson maybe underselling things a little bit. I think IDPs and Backstage and the rise of agentic systems is only going to increase in importance because agents need to feed off generally structured information, things that they understand will help them to be more effective. And IDP like Backstage structures like services, it provides the information that agents need to be actually super effective. Every organization's going to have to have this, in my opinion, be effective in the new world.

Tyson Singer

>> A lot of people are really worried about quality in the agentic age and we're seeing a lot of anecdotal stories around that. You look at the news any day and such and such company's gone down because some agentic coding happened, but we're not, knock on wood, seeing that at Spotify, and that's because, basically, what agents do is they amplify what's good in your ecosystem and they amplify what's bad. And so, if you have things that help structure your ecosystem, then you're amplifying the goodness, as opposed to amplifying the chaos and the messiness and the complexity. And so, we're quite optimistic about our transition into the agentic era. Whereas I know there's a lot of people who are a bit more-

Rebecca Knight

>> Skeptical, worried. Exactly....

Tyson Singer

>> worried about that. And so, we monitor these metrics super, super carefully, like all of our guardrail metrics in our ecosystem to see if like we're seeing quality issues and they're not showing up yet, which is a little surprising, but I think that's just one of the reasons is because we really have leaned into the value of a standardized IDP.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, how does this really change the day-to-day work of your developers having Backstage and having the system that's working for them?

Tyson Singer

>> Yeah. So, one of the things that's really important at a lot of companies is access to services, data, et cetera, and then controlling that as well. So, every company lives in some sort of governance regime, regulatory regime, so not everything should be exposed, and that sounds super obvious. That wasn't actually true at Spotify when we got started. Everything was just kind of open to everybody. And then, you grow up and you have to layer in all these things and you have to be more like a bank. Not that Spotify's like a bank, but everybody gets to that stage. And so, there's friction always to like, "Oh, I need access to this and whatnot." Developer just wants to sit in their agentic coding tool, Claude, Cursor, whatever it is, and they want to bounce around. So, now through the interface to Backstage through these MCPs, just takes care of that for you. And then, on the other end, there's somebody who needs to provide access, also just goes through their agentic ecosystem and really takes out a lot of the extra little bits and pieces that disrupt flow. And that was one of the things we really wanted with Backstage was to help remove obstacles to flow in the ecosystem. And so, having a smart chatbot in your ecosystem that knows everything because has learned that from Backstage has really improved our goalie workload by reducing it about 47%. We track everything at Spotify so we know precisely how much it has reduced it. So, it's really been impactful because every time somebody interacts with the goalie on a squad, that's an interruption. That's something that they're taking them out of their flow.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, I didn't make it to BackstageCon day zero this year, but the velocity has just been... I was there in Atlanta and it was crazy. It was packed and... How do you see the velocity? Because again, from a community perspective-

Chris Aniszczyk

>> There's many ways to measure velocity. One, you could look at like the Backstage event itself. It's one of our most popular co-located events. So, people are showing up to learn. So, that's definitely a very good sign. Actually, just before getting on here, I was actually pulling up code metrics and looking at like there's actually increased contributions overall to the Backstage project. And every year we pull a, we call it our open source velocity reports, and we look at projects within the CNCF ecosystem, across the Linux Foundation itself and just all over open source. And Backstage falls, usually top five, top six in CNCF in terms of project velocity. And it's usually within the top 100 of overall open source projects everywhere in the world. So, it is continuing to grow and attracting more contributions, especially in the age of agents and things like... I'm sure it would be fun to talk to some of the maintainers and the challengers they're seeing with... Sometimes you get a lot of contributions now, but it's overall one of our healthiest projects and is very much on its way to graduating within the CNCF ecosystem. So, I'm very excited to-

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, to that whole thing, we were having this discussion around with OpenSSF earlier around the, and this goes to your quality question, but more for the contributions. What is AI slop versus not, and bug reports and stuff like that? And it seems to be getting better, I guess, is what you were saying.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> It's hard, right? Because another man's slop, maybe another man's treasure, right?

Rob Strechay

>> Absolutely.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> You never know.

Rob Strechay

>> Well, you don't want to discourage it. Yeah.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> You don't want to discourage it, but maintainer is like... The thing that is sensitive is the time for review, right? And you still need to have that judgment call on what is accepted, and that is the thing you have to be careful of. And in CNCF, we are starting to work with some solutions providing tools and guidance to maintainers to be wary about this, and we're working on it. I think we're all learning together, essentially. This is a very fast pace and moving era that we're living in.

Tyson Singer

>> One of the things that we're really excited about with the Backstage ecosystem is we've developed a more advanced approach towards fleet management that's in our product now, which allows you to change masses amount of code all at once and change the approach towards code review as well, since that's something that slows things down and shifts the burden from the person who's receiving the change to their particular repository, to the person who's making this fleet-wide change to the organization. But you need to do that in a very safe and quality oriented way. And so, we built that into the product now. We've got something called Honk, which we've been talking about, which is our agentic fleet management solution, and it's baked in with quality checks, like Soundcheck inside of Backstage, which allows you to instruct the ecosystem to drive forward with quality as well. So, it's something that helps with some of these problems that people are seeing both on the like, "Oh, my gosh, there's so many PR reviews that I have to do," which can be overwhelming and the importance of that from a security, a resiliency quality perspective as well.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. So, the documentary is called Spreadsheet to Standard. What do you want audiences to take away? What's the main message, would you say?

Chris Aniszczyk

>> I'll go first and maybe then Tyson. So, I like the story because it starts out with a company having a problem, right? "Hey, we're collecting all this information in spreadsheets." And then, you have an engineer that usually things start simple, come up with a solution for this particular problem. And then, having the idea of like, "You know what? Let's build something that works for us and then let's go share it with the world and see who else may help with us." And I think that story of having a company that had some dedicated individuals, I think Patrick was the one that ends things in the documentary, but having a small kernel of an idea, building something useful the company and sharing with the world could change the whole industry of how they approach certain development. And I think Backstage had that small kernel of an idea of a couple individuals and it just became an industry standard and we've seen that happen a few times in CNCF. If you look at Envoy came out of Lyft, right? They're shuffling people around in cars and they decided to event a better reverse proxy essentially, and now it powers almost every major service out there. So, the takeaway I want people to have is encourage folks to innovate within your companies and don't be scared of sharing it. What's the worst that could happen? Maybe someone's like, "Okay, you don't need this." Or maybe it turns into the de facto platform engineering IDP standard used by thousands of companies out there, so that's my take. I love the simple idea turning into an amazing thing and sharing that with the world. And hopefully, over at Spotify, it's seen as something that like, "Hey, this was a worthwhile journey for us."

Tyson Singer

>> Absolutely. It was a worthwhile journey. It was a scary journey as well. Giving away one of your prized assets to the whole world is not a light and easy decision to make, but it was really important for us. And so, to answer your question, what I think is really important to take away is that when you focus on the developer experience and you make that open to not just your own company, but to like the whole world, it really pays off and it is still relevant today. A lot of developers are worried about what's going on in the ecosystem today. I'm very optimistic about this. I'm optimistic about it at Spotify because I can see that there's still a lot of attention towards making developer experience quite great at Spotify, just in a new context of tools and it's just the ongoing evolution of where we need to go. And so, this documentary takes you through that evolution at Spotify, but the story's not done. It's going on.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think it's great. And I think when you look at it, what do you hope that we can be talking about around Backstage when we get together in Salt Lake?

Tyson Singer

>> Yeah. I think you're going to see how it has actually become an integral part of how every developer does software development in the agentic age. That's what I think we'll be talking about then and how it's solving the problems and helping really continue to smooth the path for developers in creation for everybody. Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, awesome.

Rebecca Knight

>> And that it's been nominated for an Academy Award.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> Oh, I know. That would be the first documentary of ours to win it and it would be exciting.

Tyson Singer

>> Setting the bar high.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes, exactly. Great. Well, Tyson and Chris, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really fun conversation.

Tyson Singer

>> Thank you.

Chris Aniszczyk

>> Awesome. Thank you for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. I stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.