Consider a team that wants to deploy something to the cloud. Here, you can find more information on our open source contribution to Backstage and offer feedback. Next, we'll deepen the integration, providing more monitoring within the Backstage portal. The Backstage Software Catalog is a centralized system that keeps track of ownership and metadata for all the software in your ecosystem (services, websites, libraries, data pipelines, etc). Please note that the in-memory Online fashion platform Zalando decided to move away from their existing developer console and migrated to Backstage instead for its extensibility. carry on with the database steps. API Docs is an extension for the catalog plugin that provides components to discover and display API entities. Since Backstage is now the default developer portal for global teams nowadays to uplift engineering productivity, understandably, we FOMO'd and decided to do a PoC on this open-source platform built by Spotify from scratch. Backstage was founded by music streaming giant Spotify, and its vision is to be the "Kubernetes for developer experience.". What coding standards and code style do we use? Backstage unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a streamlined development environment from end to end. Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. With more than 2 years of experience, he has worked on many technologies like Apache Jmeter, Google Puppeteer, Selenium, etc. Developed by the Spotify engineering team, Backstage is an open-source platform used for building developer portals. Train your employees in the most in-demand topics, with edX For Business. We must also consider the change of context, fragmented systems, onboarding processes and outdated documentation; all these circumstances awakened the need to create a platform that solves this problem. App Accelerator: A predefined project template, which is made available to the development team. Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks. The catalog is built around metadata YAML files, which are stored together with the application code. Continue Imagine if all your tools GCP, Bigtable, CI pipelines, TensorFlow Extended, and whatever else is hiding in your stack all had the same, easy-to-use interface. Backstage, catalog, Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), CNCF, developer, developer portal, developer portals, docs, documentation, open source, portal. You can set ownership, change all sorts of metadata, like the modules or section names, as well as add other interesting components to your workspace while customizing the look and feel. Our plugins are designed to: Solve ownership Drive best practices With Backstage, you can build one central place for your engineering organizations tools, resources, and documentation from CI/CD status to Kubernetes monitoring, to API and library docs, to deciphering your monorepos, and everything in between. Research, Following a pull request from review to production, Review performance of your teams mobile features. A company might create a developer portal to promote its API-as-product, or an individual might generate one to share their knowledge and expertise. If this sounds interesting or youd like to help us shape our product vision, wed love to talk. 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 500 undergoing digital transformation, or a fast-growing startup. If your DevOps engineers are responsible for establishing a DevPortal, ensure they are experienced with UI development. It makes it easy for developers to create a new microservice, mobile feature, pipeline or any other software component; it allows to automate processes such as onboarding and offboarding. plugin suggestions, Set quality standards for engineering, know core metrics for any entity, Use the portals API as part of automated devops workflows, Platform engineering excellence through internal developer portals, Find all the information, learning and support you want, From tutorials to thought leadership and documentation, discover the power of internal developer portals, Discover platform engineering thought leadership, Explore upcoming events, live and on demand webinars. To install the Backstage Standalone app, we make use of npx, a tool to run Powered by a centralized software catalog, Backstage restores order to your microservices and infrastructure and enables your product teams to ship high-quality code quickly without compromising autonomy. Engineers write their documentation in Markdown files which live together with their code and with little configuration get a nice-looking doc site in Backstage. Yet everyone is required to know and understand Terraform, GCP/AWS/Azure CLIs, Gitlab CI, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Docker, various monitoring and alerting tools, and much, much more. Developers choose between a number of standard templates all with best-practices built in. A key benefit of the Backstage plugin model is that it allows you to add more tools without increasing the complexity for each individual user. A tag already exists with the provided branch name. Many Git commands accept both tag and branch names, so creating this branch may cause unexpected behavior. For further details, see our complete security release process. Spotifys version of Backstage. Backstage allows you to develop the two layers of an effective DevPortal - the visualization layer and the self-serve CRUD operation layer. Backstage provides a unified user experience and an extensible core framework. The Software Catalog can contain many entity types with different connections and dependencies between them. Even simple operations, such as connecting a cloud resource to service, requires diverse knowledge to ensure it stands at scale and avoids bugs and security vulnerabilities. Running the command below will install Backstage. How much test coverage is required? Backstage and the Backstage Software Catalog make it easy for one team to manage 10 services and makes it possible for your company to manage thousands of them. I decided to look more into this topic. However, to make the Developer Portal you really want, one that will answer all your developers' specific needs, you will have to write a lot of React code. If you go down this route, get ready to write some React components! These are harvested and visualized in Backstage. The visualization layer contains an overview of the organization's DevOps assets - services, cloud assets, environments, and more. Top CNCF Projects to look out for in 2023. Learn more about Tanzu Application Platform, and see thenew features that were delivered in the recent version 1.2 release. Why do tech companies need a developer portal, and at what stage does this become necessary? It will allow us to effectively implement the visualization layer and self-service layer through a set of easy-to-use plugins. For engineering managers, it allows you to maintain standards and best practices across the organization and can help you manage your whole tech ecosystem. In this guide you will: This guide assumes a basic understanding of working on a Linux based operating Developer portals provide important information and tools for prospective developers. ), familiarize themselves with their respective operations, occasionally switch between different systems and copy and paste information from one to the other, and manually string together the entire workflow, which is time-consuming and error prone. The downside of this flexibility is that it can be hard to know where to start. Backstage provides a single UX layer and unifies all your services, docs, APIs, and tools to help engineers discover and understand all the company's software ownership, deployment, and dependencies. Getting Started | Backstage Software Catalog and Developer Platform Getting Started Getting Started Getting Started For most Backstage installations, installing the standalone app will bring you the best and most streamlined experience. If you are planning to contribute plugins or to the project in general, we advise Developer portals like Backstage can help teams reduce tech fragmentation, knowledge silos, and lack of ownership while promoting creativity and autonomy. The documentation is then displayed in HTML format to be searched for and edited through Backstages Markdown files. 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. Launched as open source during "Hack Week" in March 2020, Moved from the Sandbox to the official incubation stage in March 2022, Official GA, version 1.0, released on March 17, 2022, Category (domain/system/component/resource, etc. Similar to how Backstage ties together all of Spotifys infrastructure, our ambition is to make the open-source version of Backstage the standard UX layer across the broader infrastructure landscape. Backstage is Spotify's homegrown developer portal.We've been using it internally for years, but only recently released the open source version. What about the architecture and topology diagrams? Other adopters include American Airlines, Booking.com, Brex, DAZN, Epic Games, Expedia, Glovo, HelloFresh, Monzo, PagerDuty, Splunk, Siemens, Trendyol, Twilio VMware, Wise, and. New developers can find information, everyone can share, create and collaborate together, avoiding duplication of effort, because everything can be found within one place in Backstage. The downside to the Software Template feature is that it focuses only on the create operation and not the second-day operation. Backstage is a great Developer Portal. Operate your software components easily with a transparent and centralized repository. View GitLab pipelines, merge requests, languages and contributors via Gitlab plugin. Spotify operates arguably the most advanced version of Backstage. The Golden Path tutorial is a step-by-step tutorial that guides you through this path with feedback and support. The real advantage of TechDocs is that the documentation lies in files alongside the code. Text analysis of the adopters descriptions reveals that Service catalog, Documentation, and Software Templates are the most frequently used features. The current Cloudify-Backstage integration is only an MVP release. Watch the Community Session videos below to see Box unveil their Backstage developer portal to the public for the first time, including a demo of their custom Prefect.io plugin. Each change is managed and recorded through the Git process last updated, contributors, code reviews, automated tests, owner, Github issues, etc. Most plugins are a stripped-back version of the complete tool. ), each engineer requires even more tools and domain-specific knowledge (or disciplines), from backend to machine learning, to mobile and data. The Backstage name and logo are registered trademarks of the Linux Foundation. This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository. Creating a better environment will raise productivity levels and allow companies to attract and retain engineering talent - an increasingly difficult task. The time for a Walking Skeleton is reduced to a few clicks, so software developers can focus on creating features. The plugin architecture allows for extensibility and adaptability into an organization's infrastructure ecosystem. An overview of the main parts: the software catalog, software templates, TechDocs, and other plugins. It was created at Spotify, to give our developers a better experience managing, creating and exploring our software ecosystem. Getting started with Backstage. Below I want to share some features Backstage offers. feature They help organizations scale company best practices (CI, Documentation, Logging, K8S configuration). As companies adopt more open-source tooling, and build more infrastructure internally, the complexity grows. Tech Radar allows us to visualize the breadth of technology we use and to get opinionated on which technologies we should be either converging on, or moving away from. Bring your own model or use ours. And we learned a thing or two via the feedback we received. Since the open-source version currently does not have any end-to-end use cases, it can be challenging to understand what problems Backstage can solve for you. GITHUB OFFICE HOURS The Speed Paradox A lot of work is involved in creating each module/section therefore, a helpful tool can save precious time. The npm package @backstage/plugin-sonarqube receives a total of 5,859 downloads a week. Please, After looking further, I observed that, although only released in 2020 in public, Backstage has seen surprisingly large adoption at larger tech companies. It then goes on to discuss Backstage, the leading open source framework for creating developer portals, covering the architecture, features (Catalog, Scaffolder, TechDocs, and Plugins). App Live View: Graphical display of the app's health status based on the Spring Boot app's Actuator mechanism, as well as real-time monitoring of CPU/memory, details of recent HTTP requests, dynamic adjustment of log levels, and more. You can see who is using your platform, what theyre working on, and how theyre doing. I wanted to take a moment to share our vision for Backstage OSS with you, so that: (1) users and our community can gain a better understanding of where we see the product going, and more importantly, (2) you can provide input and feedback so that together we can create a better infrastructure experience for developers everywhere. on discord, file issues for any This makes the dashboard uniquely designed for the developers using Kubernetes rather than the DevOps engineers who manage the clusters. This is Spotify's own docs-like-code solution built into Backstage. Since, it has been donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The core idea is to provide a single, consistent UI for all infrastructure . This issue mentions several vendors related to developer portals. The view provides you with all the information you need: build progress, test coverage changes, a re-trigger button, etc., so that you dont have to look for this information across different systems. With help from the open source community, Zalandos small internal team went from proof-of-concept to building a platform serving thousands of developers. As a result, a developer portal is critical to driving the adoption of an API or software product. Further insights into developer portals. The catalog is built around metadata YAML files, which are stored together with the application code. Having long recognized the importance of developer experience to building a streamlined, cloud native business, VMware in 2021 releasedVMware Tanzu Application Platform, a state-of-the-art application platform that includes a developer portal delivering a consistent GUI, constructed and extended based on Backstage. It consolidates all the information and tools that a developer might need, usually managed by the Platform Engineering team / DevEx team. you have, and feel free to Developer Portals take the chaotic ecosystem of moving parts - microservices, DevTools, CI, CD, Scripts, and so on - and make it easily searchable and accessible. Backstage is a powerful open-source developer portal platform. To engage with our community, you can use the following resources: Copyright 2020-2022 The Backstage Authors. Tanzu Application Platform application live view. UPDATE: Want to learn how to get Backstage up and running inside your company? system using tools like apt-get, npm, yarn, curl. Once developers familiarize themselves with Backstage's affordances, they'll uncover new opportunities for growth and optimization. But first: Box says hello to the community. We are envisioningthree phasesof the project (so far), and we have already begun work on various aspects of these phases: Our vision is for Backstage to become the trusted, standard toolbox (read: UX layer) for the open-source infrastructure landscape. Backstage was created by Spotify but is now hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an Incubation level project. As companies grow, their infrastructure systems get messier. Creating a tailored view to suit your developer's individual needs with this plugin can be a challenge. Backstage is an open-source software catalog and developer platform designed and developed by Spotify that enables organizations to manage their software development process more effectively. Fascinating. BackStage as the emerging IDP Portal. Why did they open source it? All rights reserved. Zohar Einy is the founder of Port. Each change is managed and recorded through the Git process - last updated, contributors, code reviews, automated tests, owner, Github issues, etc. Backstage is a powerful open-source developer portal platform. A study published by McKinsey suggests that companies with high developer efficiency grow their revenue four to five times faster than companies with low developer efficiency. Each project needs to be provided with metadata to describe itself (catalog-info.yaml), which is stored with the source code in a version control system, such as Git. No-code internal developer portals, that way they were meant to be. Here, the developer should be able to find all relevant information about the organizations services: owner, lifecycle, runtime, version, slack channel, last deployment link, and more. The course then goes over running Backstage . Backstage is an open-source software catalog and developer platform designed and developed by Spotify that enables organizations to manage their software development process more effectively. What additional features have they built, and how do they use their developer portal? By providing an easy way for developers to get started, you can reduce the barriers to entry and make it more likely that developers will use your API or product. This includes documentation, code samples, and other resources to help developers build applications. You can manage the lifecycle of your component, see which components are dependent on your API, or respond to incidents easily within Backstage. Backstage can do so many things integrating every . I have no affiliations with any vendors mentioned in this article and no conflicts of interest. As cloud native concepts and adoption take hold, many enterprises are now considering and implementing ways to achieve the primary objective of cloud native technology: enabling engineers to make significant changes to systems easily, frequently, and confidently. Supply chain visibility: Graphical display of the supply chain execution path and status, allowing further viewing of the execution details of each step. Once other resources come into play (databases, queueing, etc. Backstages core features currently focus on visualization: Service Catalog, TechDocs, and Kubernetes Plugin. Backstage is a powerful open-source developer portal platform. On top of the static documentation we also incorporate additional metadata about the documentation site such as owner, open issue and related Stack Overflow tags. Create documentation and sites by just writing Markdown. Backstage unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation with a single, consistent UI. Tanzu Application Platform application accelerator. Companies in the top quartile also had 60 percent higher total shareholder returns and 20 percent higher operating profit margins. Right now, the following API formats are supported: Other formats are displayed as plain text, but this can easily be extended. In this guide you will: Deploy Backstage Standalone with npm packages A follow-up to the original article. The Abstraction Layer which simplifies access to various components, such as microservices, DevTools, CI, CD, and Scripts, making them searchable and easy to manage. Enterprise Modernization, Platforms and Cloud, Digital Application Management and Operations. High You signed in with another tab or window. , I strive to provide an independent viewpoint, not taking any form of payment or another incentive to mention - or omit - any company, vendor, or topic. , for their insights, talked with an engineer from the team which created Backstage, and got in touch with Backstage adopters. It contains all the information and tools that a developer might need and makes it easily searchable and accessible. Signup to the Nordic APIs newsletter for quality content. This tool is part of your Node.js How do you adopt the tool? Backstage provides a centralised catalogue of your microservices and infrastructure. It provides a centralized repository for software development assets, such as code, documentation, and tools, and makes it easy for developers to search for and reuse these assets. 2.1 Core features Out of the box, Backstage includes: He also has experience in web development and has created a bunch of websites as a freelancer. But if youdig deeper, youll find that since the very beginning, Spotify has been known for its agile, autonomous engineering culture. What additional features have they built, and how do they use their developer portal? New entities and connections can also be implemented: Many enterprises find that much of the knowledge held by their developers is undocumented. Creation is crucial, but most functions are performed on already-provisioned services. Backstages Kubernetes plugin connects to your existing ecosystem, simplifying the deployment workflow and visualizing all deployment statuses in a single view. UI of the Backstage Developer Portal Image by Author. The software bill of materials provided by VMware Application Catalog is now available in SPDX format, an international open standard developed by the Linux Foundation for communication of SBoM. Ultimately, a Developer Portal is a product, and the developers are the customers. bugs Behind the playlists and podcasts of Spotifys sizable audio catalog is Backstage, touted as one of the leading choices in the Developer Portal world. Backstages Service Catalog is a unified metadata source and ownership information for all team software. The need for a developer portal. So which features do Backstage adopters find most useful?
Published on May 13, 2023


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