I saw link to backstage some time ago, but I could not figure out what it's supposed to provide. Can someone explain what it does / what do you use it for?
Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
41–50 of 72 posts
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backstage is great at slowly migrating dysfunctional organizations into slightly less dysfunctional organizations. I deal with 30 years of random tech debt in a company with immense shadow IT (domains randomly registered, vendors randomly hired to do X, often nobody knows things are still needed, our zonefiles are a mess, unclear responsibilities with our team of 4 being the default fallback), and Backstage at least…
But doesn’t that mean you have a long migration period with two systems to maintain and reconcile?
Yes. I've seen this go well, and I've seen this go terribly. It works (in my experience) when the migration work is pushed down to the directly responsible teams - with, of course, affordance made for the time it will take them. (Sidenote: that has the benefit that they learn / re-learn their dependencies for themselves, and discover efficiencies they never would have otherwise.) An overarching "migration team", or whatever you choose to call it, only adds friction, confusion, and more kludges. Management has to be fully committed, and enforce deadlines all the way down the line. Running two systems can (usually) be done short-term, but not long.
(Another thought: "short" and "long" terms are variable for different teams and different types of services. Scheduling should take that into account.)
Admittedly, however, I've not been through it at a particularly large organization. I'm sure there is exponentially metastasizing complexity (human perhaps even more than technical) once the process involves more people than can fit in a room.
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#43[dead]
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#44I saw link to backstage some time ago, but I could not figure out what it's supposed to provide. Can someone explain what it does / what do you use it for?
In a past job of a fairly decent sized org (around 80 engineers, maybe 10 different active projects, a few dozen microservices, component library, template generators, and some custom CLTs) it was very useful as a way of documentation for your engineers.
I'm sure you used stuff like confluence but it was always a terrible way to search across code bases and projects to understand how they worked.
Backstage was interactive documentation. I can see what projects we have, I can click on one, see who is maintaining it, what their communication is, what their various perf/benchmark scores were. It was nice.
Apparently it's even grown beyond documentation needs from what I can tell and it provides platform tooling now.
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#45Has 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.
I’ve introduced it at a company with ~3,000 engineers and it’s been quite successful, though we do not yet leverage all of its power and we do have a dedicated team to run it and build on top of it
We have a lot of in-house tooling and Backstage allows us to move big chunk of UIs into one place - it helps us keep UIs consistent, and makes it easier for everyone to find the tools we have. However with a lot of older, more mature in-house tooling it’s been a struggle to migrate to their data model, introduce their software templates etc.
For an org with ~50 engineers I’d recommend something more off-the-shelf like Cortex, Port, or OpsLevel
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#46Has 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 are trialing it. Setting up VPN connections, firewall rules, automated secret rotation, API key creation for centralized external services, DNS entries for private endpoints, new team onboarding, new developer onboarding, anything time consuming repeatable task that usually takes our ops or sec teams used to deliver manually in support of the various tech teams to deliver their apps into our clusters. The various “plugins” create PR’s for the ops/sec team to double check and approve to keep the auditors happy. Servicing ~500 developers. It’s definitely a platform that needs a dedicated team though.
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#47I saw link to backstage some time ago, but I could not figure out what it's supposed to provide. Can someone explain what it does / what do you use it for?
By default it offers you a few tools to better understand and manage your software landscape:
- you have all your micro services catalogues in one place, with a fairly decent data model (services are grouped into systems, they are owned by teams, they have declared dependencies on each other)
- you have documentation for each service that you can easily find
- you have a template catalogue that allows you to easily create new services. You need a full-stack app? Here, recommend option is Java + React, use this template. You need a new ML system? Here’s what you should use, click “create” and we’ll bootstrap it for you
- plus a few more, like customizable home page
If you are looking for a way to start cataloguing and standardizing services across your org, the developer portal (whether Backstage or other solution) is a good thing to have
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#48The "Featured Article" at the top means it's a sponsored post, right?
and the account that submitted here has zero comments.
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#49Has 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.
My company uses it. Our team is about the same size. I have mixed feelings. It has been useful for things like making sure a new repository is created with all of the CI goodies every project should have. You can also use it to automate things like opening PRs against your gitops repo to get apps deployed from a template.
Creating software templates can be a large investment. It would be great if there was a software template marketplace. The backstage contributors took a stab at this by creating a template repo that has not been updated in about a year. https://github.com/backstage/software-templates
If you do invest in creating a template, be sure to get plenty of stakeholder feedback so the thing you make is something that actually gets used.
Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools
#50I’m not sure who the customer is for Backstage. For a small startup, poking around in the gcp/aws console works well enough. Maintaining another console layer on top of that feels like one more thing that could break. If you’re a big company with a team that could support developer platform tools, you probably have some sort of portal system hacked together and you’ll never be able to change because somebody has a cr…
Companies grow - today you have 50 engineers and a few microservices, in 2 years you might have 200 engineers and tons of APIs and web applications. I think if old orgs could have bought off the shelf developer portals years ago, they would have. Now companies that grow have this option.
It might not be a massive market, but there are a few interesting companies building this kind of tools and they sell it