KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 Co-located Event Deep Dive: BackstageCon

Who will get the most out of attending this event? What is new and different this year? What will the day look like? Should I do any homework first? Find your community! Posted on February 27, 2026 by Co-chairs: André Wanlin, Balaji Sivasubramanian, & Bryan Landes CNCF projects highlighted in this post BackstageCon began in 2022 as the first dedicated conference for the Backstage ecosystem, bringing together adopters and contributors around the open source developer portal platform originally created at Spotify. As cloud native adoption continues to scale, platform engineering and internal developer portals have become critical to managing the growing complexity of Kubernetes, microservices, and distributed systems. Right now, cloud native adoption is colliding with AI-accelerated software delivery. Teams can generate and ship code faster than they can maintain ownership, documentation, security, and operational clarity. BackstageCon matters because the community needs shared patterns for making the portal and catalog the trusted context layer that AI copilots and agents can safely use — with golden paths, standardized metadata, and governance at the core. BackstageCon is especially valuable for platform engineering and internal developer platform teams building or operating Backstage in production. These teams will gain practical patterns for scaling Backstage across large organizations, from catalog structure and governance to plugin ecosystems, observability, and AI integration. Practitioners already running Backstage will benefit from real-world case studies and operational lessons. AI-forward organizations will see how to manage models, agents, and AI workflows as first-class entities within the developer portal. Maintainers and plugin developers can better understand ecosystem direction and integration best practices. Newcomers will walk away with a clear picture of what mature, production-grade Backstage implementations look like and where the project is heading. This year brings a stronger focus on AI and how it intersects with platform engineering.