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Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

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Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#31

Post by whirlwin »

claytonjy wrote: post #10

Has anyone successfully implemented Backstage at their company? How'd it go? We're looking at it for an internal platform serving ~50 engineers today, spanning mobile, backend, enterprise integrations, and ML teams. The hope is it'll make it easier to spin up new things "the right way" without e.g. ML PhDs having to learn Helm and K8s, plus other goodies like nice docs.

We're 30-40 developers, and we have just stopped using backstage. We started using it for APIM behind Okta SSO, but all the custom frontend and functionality tweaking needed to make it look nice was daunting.

If we start looking at it again, I'd try a simpler use-case, but definitely interested in trying it again.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#32

Post by jakozaur »

anonzzzies wrote: post #16
jakozaur wrote: post #8

It is tough to keep two widely different businesses under one roof. One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Spotify should spin off Backstage as a separate company, providing the initial IP and funding and being the first client. Many companies, like Uber, created a lot of useful infra, though they failed to monetize it. They could take a cut in the Chronosphere (M3) and Temporal (Cadence…

> One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Amazon/AWS?

Amazon is an outlier, where each business runs its profit/loss, and higher-ups act as VCs. Wish more companies were like that, but you need to take a lot of bets to make that work.

AWS worked, but the Fire phone turned out to be a write-off.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#33

Post by gghffguhvc »

jakozaur wrote: post #32
anonzzzies wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Amazon/AWS?

Amazon is an outlier, where each business runs its profit/loss, and higher-ups act as VCs. Wish more companies were like that, but you need to take a lot of bets to make that work. AWS worked, but the Fire phone turned out to be a write-off.

Fire Phone was largely outsourced I’ve been told. Was big regrets all the way to the top about that decision. Lesson learned.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#34

Post by vasco »

jakozaur wrote: post #8

It is tough to keep two widely different businesses under one roof. One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Spotify should spin off Backstage as a separate company, providing the initial IP and funding and being the first client. Many companies, like Uber, created a lot of useful infra, though they failed to monetize it. They could take a cut in the Chronosphere (M3) and Temporal (Cadence…

I think you are describing spin-in's. Made famous by Cisco. Didn't catch on much.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#36

Post by financetechbro »

jakozaur wrote: post #8

It is tough to keep two widely different businesses under one roof. One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Spotify should spin off Backstage as a separate company, providing the initial IP and funding and being the first client. Many companies, like Uber, created a lot of useful infra, though they failed to monetize it. They could take a cut in the Chronosphere (M3) and Temporal (Cadence…

Many companies, like uber, use their other more profitable business units to subsidize other business units. It doesn’t always make sense to spin out a company / product

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#37

Post by stackskipton »

claytonjy wrote: post #10

Has anyone successfully implemented Backstage at their company? How'd it go? We're looking at it for an internal platform serving ~50 engineers today, spanning mobile, backend, enterprise integrations, and ML teams. The hope is it'll make it easier to spin up new things "the right way" without e.g. ML PhDs having to learn Helm and K8s, plus other goodies like nice docs.

We piloted two jobs ago and aborted. Wouldn't recommend at your size because it seemed to do effectively, you need a "Backstage Team" which is not Ops Team who occasionally does Backstage work. Probably why Spotify is considering it because sweet consulting money.

While I don't know your exact situation, I'm currently at company of your size engineers and stop torturing your Developers with Helm is off the shelf advice I would give. See if Kustomize would get the job done and be honest. I've found Devs can handle Kustomize a ton easier since kubectl kustomize > testoutput.yaml is alot easier for them to parse.

Helm is great if you have a bunch of different things to launch with a ton of different options but most companies don't do that. They need HPA/Deployment/Service/Ingress which is easily handled by Kustomize.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#38

Post by theturtletalks »

gghffguhvc wrote: post #33
jakozaur wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is an outlier, where each business runs its profit/loss, and higher-ups act as VCs. Wish more companies were like that, but you need to take a lot of bets to make that work. AWS worked, but the Fire phone turned out to be a write-off.

Fire Phone was largely outsourced I’ve been told. Was big regrets all the way to the top about that decision. Lesson learned.

If anything, AWS looks like the outlier compared to their other projects. It only survived because of the sheer size of Amazon.com and was built to accommodate that traffic and deployment. If they set out to create AWS without the need for it, don’t think it would’ve made it this far. Even after all these years, AWS is the breadwinner, while the website it was made for can barely turn a profit and resorts to increase the price of prime every year to show revenue growth.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#39

Post by arccy »

claytonjy wrote: post #10

Has anyone successfully implemented Backstage at their company? How'd it go? We're looking at it for an internal platform serving ~50 engineers today, spanning mobile, backend, enterprise integrations, and ML teams. The hope is it'll make it easier to spin up new things "the right way" without e.g. ML PhDs having to learn Helm and K8s, plus other goodies like nice docs.

we use it through roadie.so but it doesn't feel very polished compared to other developer portals...

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#40

Post by frompdx » 

  Backstage is built on a modular, plug-in based architecture that allows engineers to layer-up their developer portal to meet their own needs.
Frankly, this is just incorrect. Just read the configuration guide for "installing" a plugin to see what I mean. You have to modify the source code of your own deployment in several places. That's not a plugin based architecture.

https://backstage.io/docs/getting-started/configure-app-with...

Additionally, check out what it takes to stand up a standalone backstage server. You used to have to clone their repo if I remember right, but now they give you a starter template via npx and leave it up to you to put all of the pieces together. They don't even ship a docker image to get you started.

https://backstage.io/docs/getting-started/

Frankly, the architecture of Backstage is ill-conceived and a hassle to operate. If you have the budget their are vendors that will deal with all of this for you. I think the concept of Backstage is fine, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

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