Coming soon 3:23 Recorded at Dutch Cloud Native Day 2026, Utrecht
Why does Backstage help so little when nobody configures it?
Backstage, properly configured
Katharina Sick of Dynatrace on Backstage: why a portal nobody configures helps little, her talk's playbook, and a cloud native advent calendar.
Katharina Sick, Developer Advocate, Dynatrace · with 
Luca Berton
Not filmed yet.
Katharina Sick is a Developer Advocate at Dynatrace who works a lot with open source.
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In brief
- Many people deploy Backstage but never properly configure it, she found, and it is such a huge beast that it won't help much until it is adjusted to the platform.
- The same applies, she said, to any tool in a platform.
- Her talk's playbook: think about the problems you want to solve, not the tools you want to have; match them to metrics and KPIs; measure a baseline; then implement and iterate.
- It sounds easy on paper, and it is hard to do in practice.
- She is building a cloud native advent calendar: a new project every other day in December, each with a little challenge.
- With AI, she tries to learn as much as she can and use it as effectively as she can while still doing a nice job.
Why this conversation
Platform teams install tools faster than they make them fit. Katharina Sick is a Developer Advocate at Dynatrace, and she had just spoken at Dutch Cloud Native Day about Backstage, in the talk Your Backstage, Your Problems, Your Metrics with Thomas Schuetz. The host recorded with her on 30 October 2026 at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, on the conference’s day of talks.
A huge beast
“I spoke about Backstage today because I found out that many people actually like, you know, deploy Backstage but never properly configure it.” Backstage is “such a huge beast that it won’t help you much if you don’t adjust it to your platform”, and the same, she said, applies to any tool you have in your platform. That was the premise of the talk.
Problems first, then tools
For the talk she and her co-speaker wrote a little playbook. First, do not think about which tools you want to have, “but think about the problems you want to solve”. Then match those problems to metrics and KPIs, measure a baseline if you can, and from there start implementing and iterating. “Yeah, it sounds so easy on paper, right? And it’s so hard to do in practice.”
An advent calendar of projects
She works with a lot of open source projects at the moment, because she is building a cloud native advent calendar: you open a new project every other day and get a little challenge about it. “Every other day, unfortunately, because I cannot pull off every day.” It runs on the 1st, the 3rd, the 5th of December and so on. She can be found on LinkedIn and at ksick.dev, her website.
Excited for what is coming
With AI, she tries to learn as much as she can and to use it as effectively as she can while still doing a nice job. As for the future: “we are kind of the generation that saw the first iPhone being in place, and now suddenly AI is coming, and we can kind of have an impact on how it is moving”. “I don’t know what is coming, but I’m excited for it.”
When it comes out
The episode is edited and in the release order. Like every episode it goes out on YouTube first, then on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.
Mentioned in this episode
About Katharina Sick
Katharina Sick is a Developer Advocate at Dynatrace who works a lot with open source.
Running this in production? Luca Berton helps platform teams take it from prototype to reliable production. See how he works
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