Backstage: boost productivity for your growing engineering team

Co-Author: Mayank Vora
LinkedIn: Jaydeep Sheth and Mayank Vora

Developers today do more than just write code. They deal with deployment, security, compliance tool management, container management, troubleshooting, searching for available code, and related documentation, among other things.

Every developer is subjected to a significant amount of cognitive load and context switching while performing various tasks with numerous tools and software. Because the documentation is dispersed across multiple sources, each task and subtask of the technology requires significant learning.

The software development ecosystem gets more chaotic as the business grows.

Onboarding a new member- A challenging and time-consuming affair:

Any growing business must bring on new employees to meet the demands of various projects. For the following reasons, it may take a new team member 3–9 months to fully ramp up and carry out tasks independently:

• Understanding the existing project structure, development code, and existing reusable services and components.
• Various development and deployment processes.
• Dependency on existing team members for effective knowledge transfer and timely assistance in resolving issues.
• Documentation that is dispersed throughout the project.

Consider the implications for a company in which the average engineer leaves after two years. They may have only been partially productive for a very short period. It will undoubtedly have an impact on the company’s growth and revenue.

Developer portals

A key for developers’ effectiveness and a bridge to fill the onboarding gap:

Collaboration among software developers is required to create a software product. Because of the increased complexity of both software and infrastructure, there is a need for platforms for effective collaboration and cooperation, and developer portals emerge to meet this expectation.

Developer portals enable developers to understand, create, interact, adopt, monitor, and govern the entire product ecosystem from a single location. It includes code, APIs, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, various tools, and essential documentation.

This portal comprehends relationships, ownership, resources, external services, and anything else necessary to understand and effectively operate the product.

Developer portals such as Backstage, OpsLevel, and Cortex can assist businesses in overcoming the aforementioned challenges by bridging the onboarding gap and managing a variety of software and documentation in one place.

From this article, we’ll learn more about Backstage through demo videos, FAQs, and our own experience and development journey.

Backstage: an open platform for building developer portals

Backstage is a centralised software catalog that streamlines the development process by combining infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation into a single dashboard. Backstage helps developers by making things discoverable without the need to jump to different screens.

Developed by spotify for internal usage and open sourced in 2020 to help other companies manage software more efficiently. It was donated to the CNCF to maintain it with the help of a global community of contributors.

Backstage arose from the need to effectively onboard engineers and provide efficiency for developers for day to day tasks.

Check out the Spotify story where they could reduce onboarding time for new members.

Similarly, companies such as Netflix, American Airlines, DoorDash, Unity, and HBOMAX, amongst others, have seen great value in adopting Backstage.

Backstage provides the following core solutions to developers:

1. Software Catalogue for keeping track of all software (microservices, libraries, data pipelines, websites, ML models, etc.)
2. Software templates for quickly launching new projects and standardizing tooling with best practices of an organization.
3. Tech docs use a “docs like code” approach to make it simple to create, maintain, find, and use technical documentation.
4. Plugins to integrate the most popular tools such as AWS, GIT, AWS cloudformation, Datadog, Sentry, Lighthouse, and cloud carbon footprint.

For example, a developer who uses Backstage can do the following:

1. Discover and track all projects, microservices, mobile features, or any other type of software component, including best practices.
2. Discover documentation with advanced search.
3. Monitor multiple and complex infrastructures and take appropriate actions, such as triggering builds, checking detailed logs, and so on.
4. Get documentation for APIs and sandboxes such as Swagger, Graphiql, and GRPC.
5. Integrate existing cloud providers such as GCP, AWS, and Azure into one place.

Checkout this below to understand the power of backstage with a short demo.

FAQs

For the most common FAQs, refer to this page from the Backstage site. We will address a few more here…

1. How do I know if Backstage is a good fit for my company?
Rule of thumb: Backstage can help if any organization has more than 200 engineers (or more than 200 microservices). Larger teams definitely stand to benefit from adopting Backstage.

2. Since it is a central place for managing software, how is it different from existing enterprise solutions such as Atlassian Suite, Gitlab, etc..?
Many organizations nowadays deal with multiple complex products using a wide range of tools and software, making cross-collaboration difficult to manage with the aforementioned enterprise applications.

This is where Backstage can help us bridge the gap, as practically any software can be integrated into the Backstage ecosystem.

3. Is Backstage only a read-only detailed tool, or is it also interactive?
It is a highly interactive tool that goes above and beyond technical documentation. A pre-existing template can be used, or a playground with built-in plugins such as GRPC, Swagger, and Graphiql can be obtained. Automation can be triggered, a CI/CD pipeline can be run, the application can be deployed to the cloud, and so on.

4. What can be customized and integrated with Backstage?
Almost everything in Backstage is highly configurable; all we have to do to add software to an existing system by following their standards.
Furthermore, there are over 150 plugins that are simple to integrate.

5. Can we manage deployment for multiple projects through Backstage?
Yes, all we need to do is just use the template and configure CI/CD and other required services.

6. How can we measure Backstage’s adoption impact on the development process?
There are numerous well-thought-out metrics, KPIs, and tactics that can be
referred to here to determine the success of Backstage adoption.

7. Does it support authentication and authorization?
Backstage comes with many common authentication providers in the core library:
1. Auth0
2. Azure
3. Bitbucket
4. GitHub
5. GitLab
6. Google
7. Google IAP
8. Okta
9. OneLogin
10. OAuth2Proxy

Conclusion

In the time to come, we can expect fervent adoption of developer portals as the benefits of accelerated team ramp-up and enhanced productivity is apparent to everybody.

Backstage is getting better and better thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of a vibrant community. If you’re wondering what’s next in Backstage, check out the full roadmap here.