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Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

github.com

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Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#11

Post by royjacobs »

For the people here that are confused as to what it does, to me it seems like it's a way of abstracting all the different infrastructure tooling that a large-scale company has.

Consider a team that wants to deploy something to the cloud in a company. They are probably engineers who aren't necessarily well-versed in all cloud tooling, yet they are required to know and understand Terraform, GCloud/AWS/Azure CLIs, Gitlab CI, Prometheus, various monitoring and alerting tools, Kubernetes, Docker, etc. And this is just to deploy their application. Once other resources come into play (databases, queueing, etc), they need even MORE knowledge.

A tool like Backstage allows developers to get a uniform overview of all their resources, regardless of how and where they are running. I'm not sure if it also allows the creation of new resources, but I guess that would be a fairly obvious direction to go in.

It won't solve the need to at some point know a bit more about the technical details about all the underlying tools, but it can allow teams to gradually learn about all this new tooling instead of having to know about everything upfront.

Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#12

Post by XzAeRosho »

kyeb wrote: post #4

I just skimmed much of their website, and felt like I was left still wondering what Backstage actually does .

The Github repo was helpful:

- Phase 1: Extensible frontend platform (now) - You will be able to easily create a single consistent UI layer for your internal infrastructure and tools. A set of reusable UX patterns and components help ensure a consistent experience between tools.

- Phase 2: Manage your stuff (next 2-3 months) - Manage anything from microservices to software components to infrastructure and your service catalog. Regardless of whether you want to create a new library, view service deployment status in Kubernetes, or check the test coverage for a website -- Backstage will provide all of those tools - and many more - in a single developer portal.

- Phase 3: Ecosystem (later) - Everyone's infrastructure stack is different. By fostering a vibrant community of contributors we hope to provide an ecosystem of Open Source plugins/integrations that allows you to pick the tools that match your stack.

It looks like an onboarding tool, monitoring, and knowledge database.

Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#14

Post by sjoeboo »

moralsupply wrote: post #9
kyeb wrote: post #4

I just skimmed much of their website, and felt like I was left still wondering what Backstage actually does .

It's a god system. It tries to do everything, but in the end does nothing well.

as a user of it, I beg to differ.

Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#15

Post by sjoeboo »

bellwether wrote: post #13

Seems like a competitor for Datadog and other monitoring tools to me.

its not a monitoring platform (though we have our own in-house opensource tool for that), its a portal for developers and engineers to mange...everything. create new components, manage capacity and deployments, see your CI builds, find documentation, etc etc etc. ties all the separate systems and tools together into a single site.

Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#16

Post by hbcondo714 »

Looks like a developer portal similar to the AWS[1] and Azure[2] open source offerings where a non-developer can execute API calls in the web browser.

[1] https://github.com/awslabs/aws-api-gateway-developer-portal

[2] https://github.com/Azure/api-management-developer-portal

Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#17

Post by dmitriid »

sjoeboo wrote: post #15
bellwether wrote: post #13

Seems like a competitor for Datadog and other monitoring tools to me.

its not a monitoring platform (though we have our own in-house opensource tool for that), its a portal for developers and engineers to mange...everything. create new components, manage capacity and deployments, see your CI builds, find documentation, etc etc etc. ties all the separate systems and tools together into a single site.

This text should be copy-pasted wholesale onto the landing page :)

Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#18

Post by kingosticks »

sjoeboo wrote: post #15
bellwether wrote: post #13

Seems like a competitor for Datadog and other monitoring tools to me.

its not a monitoring platform (though we have our own in-house opensource tool for that), its a portal for developers and engineers to mange...everything. create new components, manage capacity and deployments, see your CI builds, find documentation, etc etc etc. ties all the separate systems and tools together into a single site.

So it's an extensible dashboard / intranet site? A lot of people here are having a hard time understanding what this project is for. I think the README needs work.

Re: Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

#19

Post by tra3 »

royjacobs wrote: post #11

For the people here that are confused as to what it does, to me it seems like it's a way of abstracting all the different infrastructure tooling that a large-scale company has. Consider a team that wants to deploy something to the cloud in a company. They are probably engineers who aren't necessarily well-versed in all cloud tooling, yet they are required to know and understand Terraform, GCloud/AWS/Azure CLIs, Gitla…

Borg, Kubernetes, et al? Abstracting complexity away is great, but at a certain level you just can't hide it, I think. Would love to be proven wrong, though.
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