backstage open source

Whether they use GitHub for source code, LogDNA for logging, Datadog for monitoring, or PagerDuty for alerting, the development teams often have to piece the information together and then create their own adhoc documentation or wiki to keep that information close at hand. Today, they use their custom Backstage portal (known internally as Runway) to create a one-stop shop for their developers. Backstages focus is to provide engineers with the best developer experience in the world. According to their team, developers shouldnt be experts in every infrastructure configuration or CI/CD tool on the market in order to be productive. 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. The catalog is based on metadata YAML files. However, theres a cost to deploying and managing all of this yourself. But weve paid less attention to the developer experience. Developer effectiveness optimization involves improving the core feedback loops that developers and teams experience.

Also in alpha, Backstage Search lets you choose from modular frontend and backend components to build the right search tool for your organization. Weve raised a $15M Series-A to build the developer portal engineering teams need. Today well explore Spotify Backstage, one of the tools in this category. Backstage was created as a way to streamline how developers build microservice applications. 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. 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. Backstage doesnt require users to have DevOps knowledge, and the API-based system was designed for Kubernetes. Perhaps some of these points feel familiar to you. The tool is still in early stages and under continual development, with many features still in the alpha or beta stage. Backstage was built to help large teams document their infrastructure and services. 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. 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. For example, first, teams may need to go to a siloed infrastructure org and use their portal to provision and configure the necessary infrastructure. OpsLevel takes a different approach to solving the developer experience problem than Backstage. Backstage is an open-source project that enables developers to create their own service catalog to use in the Kubernetes universe. The web app might need a GraphQL API provided by another team. Compared to Backstage, the advantages of Cortex are a lower TCO, faster setup time, and higher overall ease-of-use. The wonderful thing about open source is the low barrier to entryget started whenever, wherever, and however you want. Online fashion platform Zalando decided to move away from their existing developer console and migrated to Backstage instead for its extensibility.

The FOSS Backstage online experience will comprise alivestream with chat, networking, a virtual get together and more. Discoverability makes it easy to find documentation and the documents creator or owner. And many have a lot of these. Looking at another scenario, lets say our hypothetical team also wants to integrate with an existing internal service. Additionally, it gives developers a central platform for all of their projects and documents. But other companies know that self-managed open-source solutions arent always the best answer. When do you need an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? A key ingredient to a successful modern digital business is a focus on engineering culture. You can track third-party software, too, so you have one place to view all the external tools you use to manage your code. All these results will show up directly in Backstage to reduce context-switching.

Docs: Focus: Backstage helps very large teams to document their infrastructure and services. 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. Strictly speaking, Backstage is not an Internal Developer Platform because it lacks operational features beyond documentation and base templating. With 27+ years of experience, Thoughtworks was chosen for our industry leadership in software development, DevOps and continuous delivery. Teams and leadership get visibility into projects, documentation, and integrations from one central place. 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. And this is just the bare minimum. The Backstage Service Catalog makes it possible for a single team to manage tens 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. actively partnering with Spotify to provide technology and consulting services. Backstages ultimate goal is to provide engineers with the best developer experience in the world. Their vision states that developers shouldnt have to be experts in every infrastructure tool on the market to be productive. An ecosystem that constantly adds new plugins to make Backstage more compatible with other tools. To get more detailed information on how the service works, they might repeat the previous process. How do Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) relate to other concepts? 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. An open platform for building developer portals.

It offers one place to view all the external tools to manage your code by tracking third-party software. 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. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Developer efficacy and efficiency is a high priority for TELUS. And from an operational aspect, youll eventually need end-user and on-call support. 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. It gives you the building blocks to create a platform to manage your complex software development ecosystem. As it was developed in response to real life challenges, Backstage was designed to serve developers of all skill levels. Backstage works to make development quick, simple, and standardized.

Enable javascript in your browser for better experience. Maintaining backstage.io comes down to a cost of approximately 150.000 USD for every 20 developers. Why use an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? the Backstage developer portal we delivered at TELUS. Engineers can use Backstage to quickly create new software thats aligned with the teams best practices. https://backstage.io/docs/overview/what-is-backstage. You get to define the standards and tooling needed by application services or components, and the templates allow you to make it easy for others to use.

First, lets do a quick intro. In short, Backstage, or backstage.io, is a developer portal platform. Powered by a centralized software catalog. 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. Despite our engineers love for our autonomous culture, they embraced Backstage for its ability to create order and facilitate collaboration.

Plugins are React components that are added to each services page. For developers, Backstage was created as a way to streamline building software components, especially microservices. It does not however allow you to operate or deploy your applications. Backstage is relatively new to the market as Spotify launched it in March 2020. 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. When a developer cant find the API or SDK they need, it doesnt just make them cranky, it brings productivity to a halt. Join us for two days of talks, workshops and panels with the most relevant experts from the Free and Open Source Software world. your cloud providers console to your security tool to your CI/CD, everything you need to manage So what do we do now that we understand the problem? Backstage Search lets you customize the search tool for your specific needs with modular backend and frontend components. Today, users have access to a free unified infrastructure with tooling, services, and documentation under one interface. Having an integrated development environment from end to end gives your developers the freedom and resources they need to solve any complex problem fast. Realizing that trying to find the owner of services by yelling in Slack channels was no longer tenable, TELUS turned to Backstage for its focus on developer experience. Backstage helps teams by giving a uniform overview of all the services, libraries, websites, ML models, etcetera. The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes. The view offered by a service catalog is especially important to developers and project managers. Oftentimes the data or knowledge necessary to build anything in large organizations is siloed and segregated in different systems. Software Catalog makes services and their metadata discoverable. Although these features are part of Backstages core offerings, the real power of this platform is in how customizable it is. This makes it easy to find and discover existing services, preventing teams in large organizations from reinventing the wheel over and over again, solving similar challenges their colleagues have already found a solution for. Learn more about the Backstage developer portal we delivered at TELUS. 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.. Why are companies turning to developer portals and service catalogs? You can create tailor-made developer portals and introduce all kinds of specific functionalities like testing, data analysis, etc. With its internal success, Spotify believed open-sourcing Backstage would help development teams everywhere navigate their internal infrastructure more easily. Its also possible to build your own plugins. When the team announced the release of the Backstage, their internal version was used by over 280 engineering teams at Spotify to manage over 2000 backend services, 300 websites, 4000 data pipelines, and 200 mobile features. It provides the ability to abstract away a lot of the infrastructure, CI/CD, and operational knowledge needed to run an application or product. See OpsLevel in action. 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. 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. In addition to searching your software catalog, you can add support for other sources like your plugins, wiki, or even Stack Overflow. 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. However, it can be quite complex to set up Backstage for your organization and adapt it to your specific needs. You might have heard of Spotify Backstage (backstage.io), a newer option in the developer portal ecosystem. For more information, please contact us at deveffectiveness@thoughtworks.com. What is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? Additionally, Backstage has made it easy to create software product templates specific to your company. Currently in beta, Backstage Software Templates let you define a code skeleton with variables that can be filled in. And it leverages Spotifys software development know-how and the years theyve spent solving this problem internally. Developers wind up spending more time gathering information and finding resources than actually coding. Now users have access to a free unified infrastructure with tooling, services, and documentation under one interface. So now that we understand the motivation behind Backstage, lets look a bit further into the product itself. That brings us to the main problem Backstage solves for many organizations: centralizing services and standardizing your tooling. Backstage TechDocs allows engineers to write technical documentation as Markdown files that live together with the code. With plugins, engineers can incorporate pre-built solutions, shared patterns, and see preferred tools, helping them get up to speed. Makes services and their metadata easy to discover and reuse. Were hiring! The idea is to remove all the friction to creating docs and make them really easy to find, so docs actually get used. Let's do a short exercise. Time-to-Hello World is reduced to just a few clicks, When the team announced the release of Backstage, their internal version was used by over 280 engineering teams at Spotify to manage over 2000 backend services, 300 websites, 4000 data pipelines and 200 mobile features. Backstage is an open-source platform for building developer portals built by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

It has core features designed to empower teams and solve infrastructure complexity such as software catalogs, software templates and technical documentation. Through Backstages frontend application, team members can find not only the information theyre looking for but discover unknown resources and scaffolding for new projects. in license compliance and trends in open source governance, Find out about new tools, best pratices and the latest ideas about the future of FOSS, From community management to funding strategies learn from industry experts and build your skill set. Within devtools, the service catalog and developer portal category has emerged recently. Some are working on the mobile app, others on a web app, and many people are working on microservices. Spotify has almost five hundred engineering teams with twenty thousand deployments a day across thousands of microservices. There is documentation, but direct support may be limited and is not guaranteed. Were looking forward to working with Spotify and others in the Backstage community to make developers' lives easier and improve productivity. All of this adds toil, knowledge silos, and complexity. find anything? Now lets break Backstage down a bit further. Backstage is vendor-agnostic and can be hosted on a variety of cloud platforms, e.g. 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. Its functionality includes a software catalog, software templates, docs like code, and a variety of plugins that can extend the platform. Its possible to build your own plugin we built a plugin that lets you add Cortex Scorecards to Backstage. The GraphQL API team might need to consume microservices. Data can be ingested from any arbitrary source. Instead of switching from The platform also makes it easier to locate info related to ownership and dependencies by other teams. This information is particularly useful for developers and product managers. Though many of your integrations will use available plugins or other open-source plugins, your team may also have to build plugins for integrations that currently dont exist. Why? Its a simple idea, but the effect on productivity is transformational. Backstage Software Templates make it easy for your developers to build a new The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user. Join the conversation to stay on top of trends and opportunities in the platform engineering community. Unlike other CNCF projects, Backstage does not come with pre-built Docker containers to deploy and will require an investment of development hours to create the Backstage app, apply customizations, and deploy to production. everyone can share, build, and collaborate together avoiding duplicating efforts because everything Software Templates enables developers to create new projects and standardize tooling with their organizations preferred practices. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see the Trademark Usage page. You can integrate your plugins, wiki, or even Stack Overflow, so all the results appear on the same screen. Though the software is free, customizations, maintenance, and operations are not. Backstages main feature is their Software Catalog where teams can keep track of ownership and metadata of all software in their organisation. Service catalogs like Backstage act as a digital registry that enables all company members to find and access the resources they need. Here are a few of their stories. 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. The core Backstage features include Software Catalog, Software Templates, Search, TechDocs, and Plugins. Backstage is what our 1600+ engineers use to manage the 14,000+ software components at Spotify. so engineers are free to focus on developing features. What started as an internal tool for the Spotify developing team has become a versatile option for creating and managing developer portal ecosystems. Want to help us do it? The 5 Core Components of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). This team will need a mix of skills revolving around operating, upgrading, patching, customizing, extending, and driving adoption of the platform. Claim: A platform for building developer portals. For information about Spotifys use of cookies, see our cookie policy. You need a team to own and build out your Backstage developer portal or service ownership catalog. When you have thousands of engineers building thousands of components, how can anyone Technical speaking, what can we find in Backstage. Spotify offered their open-source platform to the public after testing and tweaking the system to fit their needs. We like to say that if Backstage can work here, then it can work anywhere and were happy to help show you how. We have a great community in Discord; come and say hello! Our industry has become much more aware of the customer experience and how our software affects it. First, you need a team to own and build out your Backstage developer portal or service ownership catalog. Theres no need to message colleagues on Slack to figure out who owns a piece of code or where to find a runbook.

What Is Spotify Backstage? This also provides an opportunity to contribute back to the open-source community.

At the center of it all, Backstages foundation is a service or software catalog. 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.

Moreover, Backstage gives teams a central platform for all their projects and documents. Imagine you have several teams distributed around the world working on different aspects of an application.

This project provided a UX layer to help engineers quickly answer questions about software ownership, deployment, and dependencies. 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. It can do so when complemented with an Internal Developer Platform like Humanitec or other CD tools like ArgoCD or FluxCD. 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. of software components and your org to manage thousands of them. Its the simplest way for large The Developer Ecosystem Experience Team at Expedia Group is using Backstage to help engineers across 13 different travel brands manage 20,000+ applications, hundreds of developer tools, and thousands of APIs, libraries, and technical docs. It will be important to have engineering resources dedicated to keeping up-to-date with any changes and their impact on your Backstage implementation. Meet committers, community mangers, maintainers, product managers, lawyers and many others, Learn about the latest developments e.g. livestream with chat, networking, a virtual get together and more. It is important to note that Backstage is a control pane to gain visibility and reusability across your setup. 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. Below I want to share some features Backstage offers. Because it was developed to solve a genuine problem for a team, Backstage was built with developers of all skill levels in mind. Battle tested, for sure. Lets take a brief look at each feature. A service catalog allows an organization to centralize all its applications and services in one unified view. A Backstage plugin will automatically create and render a docs site + metadata, using MkDocs. https://backstage.io/docs/overview/what-is-backstage. 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. Basically, whatever your developers need outside their repo and IDE. And finally, Backstage has opened up the platform for plugins created both externally by the open-source community and by your teams. Backstage acts as a single pane of glass, providing a centralized place for all of your resources. Developers can use it for onboarding guides and good practices, and organizations can push their templates to GitHub or GitLab.

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backstage open source

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