2021/05/21

advantages disadvantages backstage Does it require developers to have DevOps knowledge? Receive a monthly curation of resources about testing, design systems, CI/CD, and anything that makes developing at scale easier. Join us for our webinar about creating a culture of reliability and ownership in your engineering team with our CTO, Ganesh Datta, on Thursday, August 11th from 3-4 EDT / 12-1 PDT.

As mentioned before, Backstage is relatively new in the industry, even for DevOps standards. They compare their platform to Kubernetes for developer experience and highlight their goal of launching Backstage to be the trusted standard toolbox on the user experience layer for the open source infrastructure landscape. Want to help us do it? First, lets do a quick intro. Compared to Backstage, the advantages of Cortex are a lower TCO, faster setup time, and higher overall ease-of-use.

Enforce best practices & hold teams accountable, Drive progress towards a culture of ownership & reliability, Scaffold new services using standard templates, Query data across all of your third party tools. The service catalog is still in its early stages of development, but it is stable and is being quickly adopted by many companies.

Docs: of software components and your org to manage thousands of them. A key ingredient to a successful modern digital business is a focus on engineering culture. Discoverability makes it easy to find documentation and the documents creator or owner. Perhaps some of these points feel familiar to you.

Lets imagine that were working in a large enterprise, perhaps one that didnt start as a software company and one that is still working through its digital transformation. Data can be ingested from any arbitrary source. Enable javascript in your browser for better experience. 2005-2022 The Frontside Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Service catalogs like Backstage act as a digital registry that enables all company members to find and access the resources they need. Backstage is a powerful open-source developer portal platform. 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. The view offered by a service catalog is especially important to developers and project managers. Backstage Scaffolder, developers can easily set up work environments that resemble production more faithfully, resulting in less friction and fewer surprises along the development path. peretti chelsea nine backstage brooklyn linetti gina according loves desk dogs much

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An ecosystem that constantly adds new plugins to make Backstage more compatible with other tools. Also, it can establish the foundation of your developer experience to provide a central hub of information for your companys services. And if your organization is much larger 1,000 engineers or more Backstage can restore order to your growing chaos. Backstage stands out for its flexibility and high degree of customization. All of this adds toil, knowledge silos, and complexity. Its also possible to build your own plugins. Software Templates enables developers to create new projects and standardize tooling with their organizations preferred practices. Backstage Software Templates make it easy for your developers to build a new Well look at the problems it solves, and whether you should bring Backstage into your organization. orgs to get started with Backstage. microservice, mobile feature, data pipeline, or any other software component To get started with Backstage, we recommend reviewing the following resources: Backstage offers plenty of customization for teams and can be a powerful UX abstraction layer for the software development process. Theres no need to message colleagues on Slack to figure out who owns a piece of code or where to find a runbook. Backstage solves this by providing a platform to design your developer portal in a way that fits your software engineering ecosystem. Backstage can be a great addition to the platform teams toolbox, especially for managing large setups and organizations (at least 200 engineers, according to the Backstage team). This article will help answer your questions about Backstage and explain important considerations to think about if youre deciding whether to adopt this open-source tool. 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). Basically, whatever your developers need outside their repo and IDE. Backstage itself brings on its own complexity and operational needs. What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg. Weve raised a $15M Series-A to build the developer portal engineering teams need. Creating technical documentation is easy with this Backstage feature. It is important to note that Backstage is a control pane to gain visibility and reusability across your setup. When do you need an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? You need a team to own and build out your Backstage developer portal or service ownership catalog. Now, lets consider the developer experience at companies that dont use a tool like Backstage. Here are a few of their stories. What is the mission and vision of Backstage.io? At this enterprise, our goal involves creating a new service or application. For more information, please contact us at deveffectiveness@thoughtworks.com. By now, the skeptic in you might be thinking: All of the above sounds great, but how exactly does Backstage accomplish all of that?. Leadership can identify projects in need of investment or services without owners. 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. So as with many open-source products like this, Backstage is not a silver bullet you can deploy and forget.

everyone can share, build, and collaborate together avoiding duplicating efforts because everything 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.. Top tier service catalogs store a range of metadata, including documentation, info regarding ownership, programming language, source code, current version, and previous updates. The GraphQL API team might need to consume microservices. A developer portal, such as backstage.io, is a strong enabler for improving these metrics. 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. As an open-source project, Backstage has a growing number of plugins that can help you customize the platform to your needs. This also provides an opportunity to contribute back to the open-source community. 2301 W Anderson Ln #102-8Austin, Texas 78757+1 (512) 400 - 0318. the lifecycle of your component is just a tab away inside Backstage. Spotify Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals to create, manage, and explore software from a single UX layer. Despite our engineers love for our autonomous culture, they embraced Backstage for its ability to create order and facilitate collaboration. Enables developers to create, maintain, find and use technical documentation through a docs like code interface. Technical speaking, what can we find in Backstage. See OpsLevel in action.

In simple terms, the faster you grow, the more fragmented your software ecosystem becomes. Teams maintaining a microservice might need to access data. It will be important to have engineering resources dedicated to keeping up-to-date with any changes and their impact on your Backstage implementation. 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. Strictly speaking, Backstage is not an Internal Developer Platform because it lacks operational features beyond documentation and base templating. Makes services and their metadata easy to discover and reuse. The Spotify team initially created Backstage as their internal service catalog to solve their problems with data silos, internal inconsistencies, and lack of integration, automation, and overview. Backstage began as an internal project called System Z at Spotify to help engineers discover and understand all the companys software, services, docs, APIs, and tools. But other companies know that self-managed open-source solutions arent always the best answer. The company has silos of information and not a lot of automation or integration between tools. TechDocs allow collocating documentation with the project source code to make it convenient for both developers working on the project and consumers of the project. This team will need a mix of skills revolving around operating, upgrading, patching, customizing, extending, and driving adoption of the platform.

What do we need to get that done? Backstage does not come with pre-built Docker containers to deploy, so teams will need to create a Backstage app, make customizations on it, build a Docker image from it, and then deploy to a Kubernetes environment. With plugins, engineers can incorporate pre-built solutions, shared patterns, and see preferred tools, helping them get up to speed.

Backstages main feature is their Software Catalog where teams can keep track of ownership and metadata of all software in their organisation. So now that we understand the motivation behind Backstage, lets look a bit further into the product itself. It may sound counterintuitive, but uniformity breeds creativity. Backstage was created as a way to streamline how developers build microservice applications. Backstage solves this by providing a platform to design your developer portal in a way that fits your software engineering ecosystem. The FOSS Backstage online experience will comprise alivestream with chat, networking, a virtual get together and more. Instead of switching from Were hiring! It offers one place to view all the external tools to manage your code by tracking third-party software. The team at Spotify calls this phenomenon the Speed Paradox. These advantages, however, can be a double-edged sword. For developers, Backstage was created as a way to streamline building software components, especially microservices. The current high demand for technology talent only serves to underscore the effect a healthy and effective engineering organization can have on motivating and retaining talent. 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. Oftentimes the data or knowledge necessary to build anything in large organizations is siloed and segregated in different systems. Backstage is an open-source project that enables developers to create their own service catalog to use in the Kubernetes universe. Focus: Backstage helps very large teams to document their infrastructure and services. Cortex is a cloud-native hosted and on-premises alternative to Backstage. Backstage doesnt support any of the standard components but adds and complements the component of Documentation. Spotify has almost five hundred engineering teams with twenty thousand deployments a day across thousands of microservices. our webinar about creating a culture of reliability and ownership in your engineering team, The Rise of the Developer Portal & Service Catalog, How Spotify Backstage Solves Problems for Engineering Teams, Backstage & Containers, Clusters and Services. 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. Why? The core Backstage features include Software Catalog, Software Templates, Search, TechDocs, and Plugins. Meet committers, community mangers, maintainers, product managers, lawyers and many others, Learn about the latest developments e.g. Backstage also allows you to create new components such as new microservices from templates. Its functionality includes a software catalog, software templates, docs like code, and a variety of plugins that can extend the platform.

It takes 24 hours to get the system ready to go, but after that, developers have access to a user-friendly service catalog. Its a simple idea, but the effect on productivity is transformational. Templates ensure that software meets your requirements around security or compliance from the very beginning. The Backstage name and logo are registered trademarks of the Linux Foundation. Spotify offered their open-source platform to the public after testing and tweaking the system to fit their needs. Backstage.io is a good add-on option for any Internal Developer Platform. And many have a lot of these. In that sense, the most fundamental use case of Backstage is information retrieval and accessing resources like documentation, ownership information, and status of running services. With 27+ years of experience, Thoughtworks was chosen for our industry leadership in software development, DevOps and continuous delivery. Or we can connect you with one of our preferred partners, who can help you get up and running even faster.

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It gives you the building blocks to create a platform to manage your complex software development ecosystem.

Want to learn more? And if any of that information changes, they may not find out until its too late. And finally, Backstage has opened up the platform for plugins created both externally by the open-source community and by your teams. Although these features are part of Backstages core offerings, the real power of this platform is in how customizable it is. That said, Backstage is a great add-on to any Internal Developer Platform and integrates well with several offerings. Currently in beta, Backstage Software Templates let you define a code skeleton with variables that can be filled in.