BackstageCon North America 2026

BackstageCon North America is a one-day, vendor-neutral event about Backstage, the open source framework for building developer portals that started at Spotify and is now a CNCF project. Members of the Backstage community organise it as part of KubeCon's co-located day on Monday 9 November 2026 at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, in a single track that runs from 9:00 into the early afternoon. The stated focus is improving developer experience and effectiveness with open source tooling, and the 2026 schedule includes sessions on plugin development, software catalogues enriched with AI, portal interface design and observability for the portal itself. Expect a crowd of platform teams who have already adopted Backstage and want to compare notes on catalogue hygiene, plugin maintenance and getting developers to actually use the portal. Entry is included with the KubeCon All-Access pass; there is no separate ticket. The co-located call for proposals took 25-minute talks, panels and lightning talks and closed on 21 June. It pairs naturally with Platform Engineering Day in the same building that morning, since a developer portal is often the front door to an internal platform.