Spotify Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals to create, manage, and explore software from a single UX layer. At the center of it all, Backstages foundation is a service or software catalog. The platform also makes it very easy to define service blueprints that can be reused across teams. Nothing is ever in one place and easy to use. Oops! Each of these teams works autonomously but they rely on the software created by others in the organization. keaton carly embark dancers vanessa Cortex has a Service Catalog providing a single pane of glass for your infrastructure, Scorecards to enforce best practices and accountability, Service Creation for scaffolding and getting new microservices up and running quickly, and a home for cross-team collaboration. For example, first, teams may need to go to a siloed infrastructure org and use their portal to provision and configure the necessary infrastructure. Join us for two days of talks, workshops and panels with the most relevant experts from the Free and Open Source Software world. Then, you can push your template to GitHub or GitLab, where it can be used by the team to standardize the creation of new services (or even something like an onboarding guide). Maintaining backstage.io comes down to a cost of approximately 150.000 USD for every 20 developers. An in-depth exploration of enterprise technology and engineering excellence, Keep up to date with the latest business and industry insights for digital leaders, The place for career-building content and tips, and our view on social justice and inclusivity, An opinionated guide to technology frontiers, A model for prioritizing the digital capabilities needed to navigate uncertainty, The business execs' A-Z guide to technology, Bringing the tech-led business changes into focus, Expert insights to help your business grow, Personal perspectives from Thoughtworkers around the globe, Captivating conversations on the latest in business and tech, Learn what life is like as a Thoughtworker, By: Tim Cochran, Technical Director and Corey Eastman, Principal Consultant. As proud members of the Backstage development community, we are constantly working to extend this platform's power. The best way to extend and extract all the value Backstage can offer your organization is with plugins. What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg. This feature significantly reduces the time looking for documentation so it can be used. A Backstage plugin will automatically create and render a docs site + metadata, using MkDocs. In order to ship and software, the developer needs to keep in mind not only the problem theyre solving but also the siloed and disparate systems they need to integrate with. With plugins, engineers can incorporate pre-built solutions, shared patterns, and see preferred tools, helping them get up to speed. First, Backstage offers an open-source developer portal platform. Additionally, it makes services discoverable within your organization, making reuse easier and more efficient. laurence It can do so when complemented with an Internal Developer Platform like Humanitec or other CD tools like ArgoCD or FluxCD. peretti chelsea nine backstage brooklyn linetti gina according loves desk dogs much Software Templates enables developers to create new projects and standardize tooling with their organizations preferred practices. An ecosystem that constantly adds new plugins to make Backstage more compatible with other tools. Today well explore Spotify Backstage, one of the tools in this category. They chose Backstage because its built for extensibility and is an open source solution supported by a strong community. It will improve the efficiency of your development teams, help them build products faster, and centralize information. Backstage was originally developed at Spotify as an internal tool and then was open-sourced in 2020. Why use an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? Oftentimes application teams in these types of organizations spend a lot of time learning and navigating the infrastructure ecosystem before they even start translating business logic into code. backstage miley vmas This project provided a UX layer to help engineers quickly answer questions about software ownership, deployment, and dependencies. Compared to Backstage, the advantages of Cortex are a lower TCO, faster setup time, and higher overall ease-of-use. The service catalog is still in its early stages of development, but it is stable and is being quickly adopted by many companies. Meet committers, community mangers, maintainers, product managers, lawyers and many others, Learn about the latest developments e.g. Or we can connect you with one of our preferred partners, who can help you get up and running even faster. Teams and leadership get visibility into projects, documentation, and integrations from one central place. However, you must decide where your development hours are best spent. Backstage has a flexible, plugin-based architecture that allows you to customize it to fit the needs of your organization whether its a large, cloud native org like ours, a Fortune 50 undergoing digital transformation, or a fast-growing startup. Now lets break Backstage down a bit further. Instead of switching from What do we need to get that done? A developer portal, such as backstage.io, is a strong enabler for improving these metrics. The relationship Thoughtworks has with Spotify helped us achieve our stated goal of getting new developers up to speed more quickly, building a one-stop shop for all phases of our development cycle and reducing time to market of new releases.. The GraphQL API team might need to consume microservices. If you were to say that we need to just write the application, you may be considering only a small percentage of the actual work thats required. Through these plugins, youre able to integrate with more systems that your development teams might use to build, deploy, and operate their applications. To set up CI/CD, the team might need to go to another team to provision pipelines, or sometimes even set up their own. We have a great community in Discord; come and say hello! Although these features are part of Backstages core offerings, the real power of this platform is in how customizable it is. Often, they make their biggest breakthroughs when they know someone who knows someone on the application team they need to connect with in order to unblock their progress. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you. 2021 Spotify AB. Imagine you have several teams distributed around the world working on different aspects of an application. Spotify created it over the course of the last decade to solve internal problems like data silos, lack of integration, automation, consistency, etc., but only launched it in March 2020. Lets take a brief look at each feature. Thoughtworks takes a metrics-driven approach, using the four key metrics, along with others such as time-to-launch service, time-to-productivity for new employees and qualitative measures of developer satisfaction. Because it was developed to solve a genuine problem for a team, Backstage was built with developers of all skill levels in mind. Backstage works to make development quick, simple, and standardized. So as with many open-source products like this, Backstage is not a silver bullet you can deploy and forget. It allows you to track and manage all of your services, apps, pipelines, and more all in one place. TechDocs allows developers to create, maintain, find, and use technical documentation through a docs like code approach. https://backstage.io/docs/overview/what-is-backstage. In short, Backstage, or backstage.io, is a developer portal platform. Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals, created at Spotify, donated to the CNCF, and maintained by a worldwide community of contributors. Creating technical documentation is easy with this Backstage feature. While Backstage provides many advantages, there are challenges to be aware of when working with this tool, primarily because it involves a significant engineering investment. Battle tested, for sure. It takes 24 hours to get the system ready to go, but after that, developers have access to a user-friendly service catalog. When youre Canadas largest telecom, theres a lot of tech to look after. The FOSS Backstage online experience will comprise alivestream with chat, networking, a virtual get together and more. So what do we do now that we understand the problem? Technical speaking, what can we find in Backstage. Most large companies have at least some of these problems. And if any of that information changes, they may not find out until its too late. Its important to note that Backstage is built using Node.js and Yarn, and depending on your tech stack, additional expertise and work to integrate these technologies may be needed. Its possible to build your own plugin we built a plugin that lets you add Cortex Scorecards to Backstage. The platform also makes it easier to locate info related to ownership and dependencies by other teams. This feature helps your team find the metadata and ownership information of all the software they are working on. Backstage is a powerful open-source developer portal platform. Developer efficacy and efficiency is a high priority for TELUS. The service catalog is still in its early stages of development, but it is stable and is being quickly adopted by many companies. Backstage includes several features for organizing software and related documentation: Currently in alpha, the Backstage Software Catalog is a unified source of metadata and ownership information about all the software that your team works on, like microservices, APIs, data pipelines, libraries, and more. OpsLevel takes a different approach to solving the developer experience problem than Backstage. Netflix looked at a lot of different options to fill their developer portal needs. Service catalogs centralize an overview of all services that are essential to an organizations stakeholders. AWS vs. Google Cloud. Its a simple idea, but the effect on productivity is transformational. The web app might need a GraphQL API provided by another team. Backstage reduces that everyday friction, cognitive overhead, and operational toil, so your developers can focus on what they want most: building and shipping great code. Teams maintaining a microservice might need to access data. Backstage is an open-source platform for building developer portals built by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. foss The view offered by a service catalog is especially important to developers and project managers. Backstage also allows you to create new components such as new microservices from templates. Over time individual services diverge and critical information gets lost. Backstage seamlessly integrates with several other tools, like Internal Developer Platforms, CD, monitoring and others. Enables developers to create, maintain, find and use technical documentation through a docs like code interface. Enterprise Modernization, Platforms and Cloud. With the ability to easily explore infrastructure via a UX layer, engineers can discover new ways to reuse code or collaborate with other teams. This will require the following technologies: As explained here, your Kubernetes deployment will also need to be configured to access a databaseBackstage supports PostgreSQL or Sqlite as the built-in database options. It will be important to have engineering resources dedicated to keeping up-to-date with any changes and their impact on your Backstage implementation. Learn about the additional features your team can build and customize in this guide. Enable javascript in your browser for better experience. The core Backstage features include Software Catalog, Software Templates, Search, TechDocs, and Plugins. Our on-site venue TUECHTIG is aformer industry loft in a former lightbulb factory turned into an event space with a focus on accessibility in Berlins Wedding. of software components and your org to manage thousands of them. Within devtools, the service catalog and developer portal category has emerged recently. And it leverages Spotifys software development know-how and the years theyve spent solving this problem internally. They know where the product is lacking and have the capacity to build it out to suit their specific needs. Makes it easy to find documentation and trace ownership. One of the key benefits of Backstage is that it doesnt require users to have any DevOps knowledge, developers have access to a user-friendly service catalog they can intuitively consume. Today, they use their custom Backstage portal (known internally as Runway) to create a one-stop shop for their developers. Basically, whatever your developers need outside their repo and IDE. OpsLevel can provide all the same benefits, without the hassle and hidden costs of running an open source project like Backstage. Open Source Plugins constantly adding to the number of compatible plugins to make Backstage more compatible with other systems. However, it can be quite complex to set up Backstage for your organization and adapt it to your specific needs. Here are a few of their stories. In simple terms, the faster you grow, the more fragmented your software ecosystem becomes. To learn more, watch the webinar video or book a one-on-one session with the Backstage team at Spotify. is discoverable inside Backstage. Time-to-Hello World is reduced to just a few clicks, Discoverability makes it easy to find documentation and the documents creator or owner. Service catalogs like Backstage act as a digital registry that enables all company members to find and access the resources they need. An In-Depth Introduction. The company has silos of information and not a lot of automation or integration between tools. And then to operationalize their application, theyll need to go to different systems, enter various tickets, and fill out various forms to ensure that they have the proper logging, monitoring, and alerting systems set up. As one of the earliest adopters of Backstage, the developer experience team at American has had a firsthand look at how the community has grown. Backstage stands out for its flexibility and high degree of customization. However, theres a cost to deploying and managing all of this yourself. As a result, it was important to take a lean and agile approach to creating a unified and seamless TELUS experience for all our developers while also continuing to benefit from the community contributions and on-going development of Backstage, said Steve Tannock, Director, Platform Technology & Tools at TELUS Digital. Focus: Backstage helps very large teams to document their infrastructure and services. And it makes service ownership clear and easily updated by the development teams. The team at Spotify calls this phenomenon the Speed Paradox. Cortex is a cloud-native hosted and on-premises alternative to Backstage. Our rule of thumb: if your organization has over 200 engineers (or over 200 microservices), then Backstage can help. Next, Backstage provides out-of-the-box management for your technical documentation. Backstage doesnt require users to have DevOps knowledge, and the API-based system was designed for Kubernetes.