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Backstage: Restoring Order To Your Chaos

2022-05-19

Authors:   Dave Zolotusky


Summary

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals that helps manage and explore software ecosystems.
  • Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals that consolidates all the tooling that developers need in one place.
  • It helps manage software ecosystems by creating, maintaining, and exploring software components, systems, and domains.
  • Backstage enables better collaboration within teams and across organizations.
Spotify faced challenges in managing their software ecosystem due to the explosion of available technologies and the difficulty of onboarding new employees. They built Backstage to consolidate all the tooling that developers need in one place and to enable better collaboration within teams and across organizations. Backstage aligned different autonomous distributed teams and brought together hundreds of them, thousands of engineers, and tens of thousands of software components of all different types. It unlocked a lot of potential across their teams and helped them tame the chaos in their software ecosystem.

Abstract

The CNCF Landscape is a complex ecosystem of frameworks, technologies, and platforms. Your teams have their own implementations of these technologies. Onboarding new developers is super confusing, and docs are scattered around the place. In short: chaos. The solution to this might be… another portal? Backstage (https://backstage.io), a platform you can use to build your own developer portal. It is highly customisable and adopted by companies like Expedia, Netflix, American Airlines, and Epic Games. Dave will share why Backstage was developed at Spotify, how it became the core of their developer experience, and a CNCF project. You’ll get a quick tour of Backstage, the plugin ecosystem, and some of the key use cases for Backstage. Then he will dig into the Software Templates feature. How templates can help developers quickly get started with new code repositories. He will also cover how you can create custom templates to have your organizations best practices built-in, right from the start!Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!

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