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Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

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Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#61

Post by stackskipton »

claytonjy wrote: post #60
stackskipton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advi…

I'm somewhat new to helm, after a year I feel like I'm pretty good at it, but struggle to teach other ML folks what I've learned the hard way over the last year. Some of that is helm, plenty of it is Kubernetes. Most of our charts are ingress, service, deployment, service account, scaled object (keda), but there's plenty of small variation even across ML applications, plus the different needs of other teams. Any good…

Documentation is best: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/

However, biggest is it's just YAML patching. So you don't have this {{if such}} littered throughout your project that people can't easily pick up. Values is biggest reason I see people want Helm but if it's all env variables, kustomize lets you put in .env file it turns into config map and injects into deployments.

It's possible Kustomize doesn't fix your problem esp if Developers have decided it's not their problem. I just find Devs find Kustomize much easier.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#62

Post by shanemhansen »

muhehe wrote: post #41

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?

To me it looks like a SharePoint for engineering teams.

With plugins focused around projects/deployments/metrics.

Which sounds actually interesting.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#63

Post by moltar »

parpfish wrote: post #3

I’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…

Yes, and it’s not just poking. You have to actually code lots of stuff from scratch and maintain it. Feels like you almost need a full time person maintaining it.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#64

Post by moltar »

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.

Look into projen. It’s not as heavy and doesn’t require any services. But makes it easy to template and spin up projects. But the key is that templates are living and updatable. If you want an intro and a free consultation reach out via email in my profile.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#65

Post by frompdx »

MyFedora wrote: post #56
frompdx wrote: post #40

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/config…

I did not expect that. So Backstage asks you to manually insert plugin components into the app source code? Yeah... that really doesn't feel like a plugin architecture to me. More like patch the source code so it does what you need it to do. Nothing wrong with that, but not a plugin architecture.

The trouble with the way Backstage is designed is that it makes keeping everything up to date difficult. It is also harder for them to ship updates for their core and plugins due to the labor involved in incorporating any updates.

A plugin architecture like Wordpress or Grafana is much more manageable for an operator. In fact, a set of plugins for Wordpress could probably get you an equivalent solution, but it's PHP, so you know, ew. I'd love to see an alternative to backstage that gets it right.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#66

Post by frompdx »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #6
parpfish wrote: post #3

I’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…

Glad I'm not the only one confused. Even the product purpose seems vague... > Libraries, websites, ML models — you name it, Backstage knows all about it

This is in reference to the software catalogue feature.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#67

Post by frompdx »

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…

Backstage is an open source CNCF project. It needs a corporate sponsor to keep it alive.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#68

Post by frompdx »

claytonjy wrote: post #60
stackskipton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advi…

I'm somewhat new to helm, after a year I feel like I'm pretty good at it, but struggle to teach other ML folks what I've learned the hard way over the last year. Some of that is helm, plenty of it is Kubernetes. Most of our charts are ingress, service, deployment, service account, scaled object (keda), but there's plenty of small variation even across ML applications, plus the different needs of other teams. Any good…

Helm is what you should use as your cluster "package manager" to install all of your favorite off the shelf tools. Kustomize is probably a better choice for shipping your internal projects due to the variations you mentioned, but also because the learning curve isn't much steeper than learning about how to work with plain Kubernetes manifests.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#69

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #59
morkalork wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do we know you aren't just one of replyguy's bots being used to promote his service right now, eh?

To take this seriously, probably by account age, there just aren't that many 2007 accounts so eventually astroturfers will have to resort to newer and newer accounts.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#70

Post by frompdx »

tuyguntn wrote: post #20

people who are using DataDog, how does it compare to DataDog service catalogs? If I want to use Backstage what kind of value add it provides over observability tools with cataloging tools?

The scaffolder is the part Datadog won't get you, and in my experience it is the most useful feature.
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