Portal for dev tools

Talk at KubeconNA 2022

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