Empowering Developers & Streamlining Workflows with Backstage
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, efficiency and consistency are paramount for any organization striving to stay ahead of the curve.
Within DPE (Digital Product Engineering), we recognize the importance of streamlining our development processes to foster innovation and collaboration across teams.
This becomes more crucial in a cross-located and dynamic team setup. That is why we are thrilled to announce our adoption of Backstage — A powerful platform designed to centralize our service catalog and standardize service and infrastructure creation.
Backstage, originally developed by Spotify, is an open platform for building developer portals. It unifies infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a streamlined development environment from end to end.
Why Backstage?
Backstage offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges we face in managing our ever-expanding ecosystem of services, APIs, and infrastructure. By centralizing our service catalog, Backstage provides a unified view of all our internal tools and resources, enabling teams to easily discover, consume, and share services across the organization. This not only promotes transparency but also facilitates collaboration and knowledge sharing among teams.
Furthermore, Backstage's templating capabilities can revolutionize the way we create and manage services and infrastructure. With customizable templates, we can standardize project setups, ensuring consistency and reducing the time and effort required to onboard new services. This standardization improves efficiency and enhances our systems’ reliability and maintainability.
Our Journey Towards Centralization and Standardization
The decision to adopt Backstage was driven by our commitment to excellence and continuous improvement. As our teams grew, so did the complexity of managing our services and infrastructure. We realized the need for a centralized platform that could provide visibility and control over our entire ecosystem while also promoting best practices and standardization.
With Backstage, we are taking a proactive approach to address these challenges. By centralizing our service catalog, we are breaking down silos and creating a culture of collaboration and innovation. Teams can now easily discover and leverage existing services, reducing duplication of efforts, and accelerating time-to-market for new services.
Moreover, by using templates to standardize service and infrastructure creation, we are ensuring consistency and reliability across our organization. Whether it is deploying a new micro-service or provisioning a cloud infrastructure, teams can rely on predefined templates to guide them through the process, eliminating guesswork and reducing the risk of errors.
First things First
Backstage can be overwhelming to start with and involves some initial effort to get started. Also, as it provides a plugin-based framework, supporting custom requirements becomes easier. However, we wanted to focus on the core features first which would involve less time for set-up and provide immediate value to our developers.
The features we are rolling out:
- Centralized service catalog with updated and relevant service metadata — A central service catalog. The most important part here was to ensure that the service metadata is relevant and useful, with proper ownership set, along with having an effortless way to register to the service catalog.
- Standardized service/infrastructure scaffolding — Standardizing and templatizing service creation and infrastructure has a cascading effect on managing services more efficiently, cost optimization, visibility, and operational excellence. The best part of templates is they are easy to create, can be re-used and enforce standards out of the box when setup correctly.
- Overview of our tech ecosystem (aka TechRadar) — The technology ecosystem and overview are very crucial to understanding how we leverage various tools/frameworks, providing better visibility, take decisions on streamlining and identify/evaluate what is important.
What’s Next
Our adoption of Backstage represents a significant milestone in our journey towards centralization and standardization. By embracing this powerful platform, we are not only improving our development workflows but also laying the foundation for future growth and scalability. We are excited about the possibilities that Backstage brings and the impact it will have on our organization as we continue to innovate and evolve.
In the coming months, we will be rolling out Backstage across our organization and working closely with teams to ensure a smooth transition. We are also promoting a collaborative model, where developers feel empowered, contribute towards Backstage plugin development, and keep improving the offerings. We are committed to supporting our teams every step of the way and providing the resources they need to leverage Backstage effectively.
Stay tuned for more updates on how we set up Backstage as we can’t wait to share our experiences with you. Keep an eye out for our upcoming article where we’ll dive deeper into the details of our implementation — coming your way shortly!
#DevOps #Backstage #Engineering #Syngenta
