Backstage has been open sourced for ~2 years
“single pane of glass” which allows to help devs adhere to standards. Has a big ecosystem of plugins. (200 used internal to spotify, written by 100 devs which power 1000’s of devs) It allows you to centralize all tech assets.
I think this is similar to eBay’s cloud console, but is more tied to gitops.
Software creation:
- has tools for bootstrapping new applications using “software templates”
- form to generate repos given some input values
Onboarding:
- documentation tools hooked into it
- single click to edit docs in github
They have a notions of “golden paths” within the tool.
Stats:
- 440+ companies adoping
- 240 companies evaluating
- 200 companies attended office hours in past 5 months.
- 7.5k discord folks
Current adopters are doing:
- software catalog (SDA SE; consultancy) is used to align on available services and API and ownership
- technical documentation and finding what a dev is looking for
- build a better content-editing services to help w/ non-technical adoption for docs (using contentful)
- author APIs (american airlines)
- A taxonomy-oriented approach to service inventory (Deuche Bank)
- Daily announcements to devs when they log-in (soundcloud)
- badges / gamification (SDA SE & splunk)
Other ideas:
- measuring productivity
- branding
- external dev use-cases
- automation hub for business processes
Go chat w/ backstage folks at the booth
- DONE Completed: 2022-10-26 Q: What is a “team”? No team. Only groups. Groups are groups of users.
Q: What does backstage know (e.g. what’s it’s state)? Git repo? Anything else? Backstage knows about git repos. plugins maybe have databases (or maybe hook into APIs):
- Database of “software catalog” (which is a plugin)
Q: I have a giant pile of apps. What’s the bootstrapping process for backstage look like?
- Expedia talked about this. They have 200k services in their catalog.
Strangler:
- new things are created via backstage.
look at “Entity processors” and “entity providers”
- injects data into the catalog.