Accelerating Developer Velocity with Backstage Self-Service Capabilities

Hi everybody. My name is Rich Montbriand. I'm with Liatrio and I'm the Chief Revenue Officer, and I'm joined by Connor today. We're going to talk to you about how to accelerate developer velocity with Backstage self-service capabilities. Connor, would you mind introducing yourself to everybody? Yeah of course, Rich. Hi everyone. My name is Connor Mulligan. I'm a Senior DevOps Engineer here at Liatrio, and for the past year and a half, I’ve been working on our internal Backstage portal and at various clients helping them with their developer portal and accelerating developers. Outstanding. So what we're going to talk about today is a very quick snapshot on the Liatrio view on digital value creation, how Backstage accelerates value for our clients—that's what's most important. We'll do a live demo and show you how Backstage works and its impact. And then lastly, we'll take you through some of that self-service development and workflow automation and how it really affects you and how you can incorporate it into your business—and how Liatrio works with clients. So without further ado, let me just quickly start with: who is Liatrio? Why are we here? At Liatrio, we believe our mission is really to help enterprises accelerate and mature their software delivery systems. We help work within your existing toolset, process, and culture. We eliminate waste, increase efficiency, and really help you drive total velocity when you create digital value. Our primary goal is to help you be successful using your existing platforms and technologies. We work hard to enable platform engineering, application modernization, and AI-led engineering. At the top of this chart is a general process and methodology. We typically start with value stream mapping, which helps align culture, process, and points of view to take out waste and increase efficiency. We do a lot of platform build work. We work with AutoGov, platform management, and dojos for ongoing micro VSMs to keep your culture moving rapidly. That's all underwritten by AI-led engineering. We don't have time to talk about that today. Today we’re going to focus on: how do you implement an IDP, and what does Backstage do for you? What we hear from most of our customers—and I hope this hits on some of your challenges—is: 1) it’s hard to deliver meaningful business value from day one when developing applications and throwing them out to infrastructure, whether on-prem or cloud. 2) Developers say, "All I have to do is code," and want to reduce dependencies on platform teams. 3) They want easy and fast development package onboarding and don't want to deal with wait times. 4) They want standardized workflows and instant dev environments without adapting their ways of working to new tooling and friction that comes with new security models, etc. We’ve got a better way to pave that road so your developers can focus on what they do best: creating new features, business value, and code. It’s about going from months to create digital value down to minutes. We’ll talk about how—with Connor here. So Connor, why don’t I get out of your way and turn the keys to the car over to you? Would you mind sharing your screen and taking us through what you want to show? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Rich. With Backstage, we want to accelerate and help our developers as much as possible. Today I want to cover going from a template in Backstage to creating a fully-fledged Go application—a “getting started and keep going” kit. This application is ready to be deployed to dev and prod with everything we believe a Liatrio application should need: GitHub workflow CI, local development, tests, deployment manifests—all that good stuff. From there, I’d like to take that application and deploy it to our internal platform—our KPv3 platform, which is our internal Kubernetes platform here at Liatrio. So without further ado, let me hop right in. Here’s our Backstage instance. From here, as a developer, let’s say I wanted to create a Go application. Perhaps I’m new or haven’t created one before. From the home page, I can click “create an app.” We have a few different selections, but I’ll focus on the Golang application template. Clicking "Create," we’re met with a form. We fill out some basic information, and it generates a whole repository with everything needed to get to dev and prod. I’ll call it “ConorWebinar101,” set an owner (we’re a GitHub house internally), and provide my Liatrio email. Something really cool—we can throw in a Slack channel ID. This channel will be used to send alerts from KPv3 and down the line from Honeycomb. Oh that’s really cool, Connor. I like that. Oh it’s awesome, Rich. We can see not only whether the pods are running, but get a lot of telemetry from Honeycomb as well—observability. I’ll click next, give the repo name “ConnorWebinar101,” review, and click “Create.” Backstage actions run in the background, rendering the template, publishing the repo to GitHub, adding branch rules, and registering it in the Backstage catalog. That was fast. How long would that normally take if I did it myself? If you did it yourself, it could take days or weeks depending on experience—not just creating the app but also setting up everything required for deployment. We save a lot of time and eliminate many manual steps. From here, we see next steps and can go to the new repo. This isn’t just a main.go hello world—it’s a fully-fledged app ready for dev and prod. That’s amazing. That would take me forever to get set up in a real environment. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you’re new to Go or your organization. You’d have to talk to the platform team, understand documentation, security, etc. Just getting the infrastructure provisioned can be overwhelming. Now it’s self-service. You get GitHub workflows running builds and tests immediately. There’s a manifest folder with base and overlays for dev and prod—built into the template. Not only that—you get the Go app instrumented with OpenTelemetry, performance testing via K6, and Tilt for local development, which speeds up the whole cycle by mirroring the dev and prod environments. One thing I want to call out—this isn’t just a “hello world” repo. It’s a fully-functional application that’s ready to grow. So you’re saying we basically have full functionality—not just scaffolding? Exactly. From here, I’ll show onboarding the app to our internal platform using another template. First, we add the new repo to a GitHub app. Yeah this is usually where I get stuck. Keep going. Yeah, the logins can be tricky. But we see the repo now, save that—prereq done. Previously, you’d create a ticket, wait, go back and forth with the platform team. Now it's self-service. Now we fill out another form: team name, select the repo, choose the environment (let’s do dev), create a new namespace and app name, and set the upstream URL to point to the dev overlay. After that, we check the workflows—yep, succeeded. We got a release on the repo. I like that you’re doing this live and not pre-canned like most webinars. Appreciate the daredevil approach. Of course. That’s what we’re all about at Liatrio. Let’s check the repo version and click Create. Backstage uses its scaffolder and actions to fetch the repo, apply templated code, and open a PR in the KPv3 monorepo with everything the platform team needs to onboard the app. We create namespaces, add net policies, labels—all of which would’ve been manual before. That’s a big time saver. That’s amazing. But I bet people are wondering—does this come out of the box? Templates do come out of the box with Backstage. If I show the YAML for our app onboarding template, we see parameters like title, owner, etc.—and the steps that run backstage actions. Backstage includes many out-of-the-box actions, and there’s a robust community with custom actions you can include. What’s the Liatrio special sauce? We’re focused on truly improving developer experience. We don’t want Backstage to be just another thing developers dread. We treat developers as our customers, partner with platform teams, and help them build out templates that bring immediate value. This is amazing, Connor. I really appreciate you rolling through this so quickly. We’ve been on for about 27 minutes, and you did all that work—which usually takes months—in just 16 minutes. Why are we here? Liatrio and Spotify signed an agreement to streamline developer experience for enterprises using Backstage. Our goal: a minimum 76% increase in developer productivity. But more importantly, we’ve seen it in the real world. A major aerospace company, a North American telecom, and a global fintech provider have all gone from weeks to minutes in deployment time—with a 99% reduction in infrastructure lead time. Has that been your experience with new clients? Absolutely. There’s huge appetite for this. Backstage solves pain points—not just starter kits, but truly opening up platform services as self-service to developers. That’s why Spotify chose Liatrio as a preferred partner—not just for implementation but for cultural alignment. We deliver high-velocity MVP platforms in 4–12 weeks, pair with clients, and coach them. We don’t want to stay forever. We bring tools, recipes, and turn insights into action quickly. Across our customer base, we average a 93.17% improvement in software build velocity. This isn’t a one-off—it’s based on hundreds of clients. A lot of it comes from the Liatrio Ignite playbook. We’ve included a QR code so webinar participants can download the Ignite playbook and learn about our thinking on product mindset, empowered culture, tech excellence, and modern engineering practices—all to deliver business value through software. If you have questions, talk to one of our Backstage or engineering experts. We’re happy to help you with your specific needs. Connor, thank you for taking the time today—and for all the work you do with our clients. And thank you to everyone for joining. If we can help you, please reach out. Take care everybody.