Click here to return to Amazon Web Services homepage, Using the AWS Proton plugins for Backstage tutorial, An entity card that can be added to the component UI to provide an overview of the current state of the Proton service associated with a Backstage catalog component, The Backstage scaffolder will template the initial source code for the application and push it to a new GitHub repository, The action invokes the Proton CreateService API to create the corresponding service using a Proton service template that has already been created by the platform team, Proton will create the service and service instances associated with the specification it was provided in the template, The CodePipeline pipeline created by the Proton service will access the code in the GitHub repository to build and deploy the service to one or more service instances, Creating the pre-requisite AWS Proton resources, Bootstrapping your own Backstage application, Installing the Proton plugin for Backstage, Authoring a software template that integrates the plugin as part of the scaffolding process, Creating a component that uses this software template. Depending on the company, additional information may be essential. The top 10 fallacies in platform engineering. Not to mention production code, Infrastructure as code, etc. Observability platform built to help engineers create and monitor their software. Your submission has been received!

Discover valuable insights hiding inside Xcodes build logs. To learn more, please read our blog post and join the private waitlist. Thats exactly what we did with our Infrastructure as code, Chaos experiments, Grafana dashboards and everything supporting production readiness. View FOSSA license compliance of your components in Backstage. But what are developer portals? An article explaining the approach is also available - https://frontside.com/blog/2022-03-24-testing-backstage-catalog-ingestors/. Explore the full functionality of Humanitec. Its use of TypeScript proved to be very helpful when mapping client-side JSON structures to those in server-side Golang. Backstage is an open-source project that provides a framework for building developer portals, letting organizations provide development teams with features such as a software catalog, scaffolding tools for new projects, and aggregating the data they need from disparate development tools into a single pane of glass. What is the right level of abstraction an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) should provide? Automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Additional open source plugins built by Spotify to help you create, manage, and explore your software ecosystem. View all open GitHub pull requests owned by your team in Backstage.

Visualize, understand and optimize your team's tech health. Things like security as code or Finops tags, validations, etc. He covered AWS, Terraform, Flux and Helm. Visualize your company's official guidelines for different areas of software development. Niall is a Sr.

Copyright 2022 Backstage Project Authors.

He covered how they manage changes, and how those changes make it to production.

Sometimes the testing framework will be different, and sometimes the CI and CD tools will change, not to mention shared modules and documentation. Create GitOps-managed Kubernetes clusters. He is currently focused on helping customers leverage container technology to meet their business objectives. Identify any active incidents for an entity and the escalation policy. Users can click Explore GitOps Clusters to create and manage clusters using the GitOps plugin. Embed Datadog graphs and dashboards in Backstage. Given its digital implementation, the service catalog acts, at a minimum, as a digital registry and a means for highly distributed enterprises to see, find, invoke, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the company. We also know that the community is already looking for other ways to use Backstage with AWS services, and were keeping an eye on the requests in the Backstage repository for integration with services such as AWS CodePipeline and Amazon Elastic Container Service. Developers helping DevOps that helps Developers, Isnt it cool :)? OpenMic is an event organized by Frontside Software, Roadie, and other community members.OpenMic is not officially affiliated with the Backstage Project or the Linux Foundation.

This view is especially interesting for the team owning said service, as it makes it easy to learn about any missing functionalities or potential new features. Are they a mandatory requirement or a misunderstood evil?

A template using this action will provide feedback in the Task Activity screen when a developer creates a component: The following diagram illustrates how the various components within the scaffolding system work together with this action: Composability is a central principle to Backstage. (** Infragod is our Terraform solution in Wix, you can check my meetup on Infragod here). It allows anyone in the enterprise to find out very quickly whether a certain required service is already available to then coordinate directly with the respective responsible team. Manage releases without having to juggle Git commands. Although some people seem to think they are mutually exclusive, IDPs and service catalogs (or Humanitec and Backstage) actually complement one another quite well.

The Using the AWS Proton plugins for Backstage tutorial, included in the GitHub repository for plugins, provides instructions on how to start using the plugin with your AWS account. Spotify actually said they reduced onboarding time by more than 50% since introducing Backstage internally. In the DevOps and software infrastructure realm there are a few examples of similar yet different service catalogs: For the purpose of this article, well discuss service catalogs like Spotify Backstage, which enable enterprise teams to create an organized and curated collection of all business and information technology services and applications within an enterprise. Creating a template is just the beginning of the development flow, after that you have CI/CD and second-day operations. At Humanitec, we often get asked how this functionality compares to that of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). Were creating the aforementioned Terraform modules with all our infra and code standards, thus bringing all this velocity to our DevOps. PagerDuty offers a simple way to identify any active incidents for an entity and the escalation policy. Its also extremely difficult to map out similar if not identical services to avoid duplication and prevent engineers from reinventing the wheel over and over again across multiple teams. Access Airbrake error monitoring and other integrations from within Backstage. Components to discover and display API entities as an extension to the catalog plugin. In the Kubernetes universe there is an extension API called. Missing a plugin for your favorite tool? Integrates GraphiQL as a tool to browse GraphQL API endpoints inside Backstage. Its simple sign up for our newsletter. Ops teams also use service catalogs as a way to define templates and blueprints for the rest of the engineering organization to use. Learn how to build your IDP with Humanitec. One of the best tools out there that can help you standardize the development flow with CI/CD and second-day operation are the developer portals. Head of Production Infrastructure and Apollo Platform at Palantir, Distinguished Engineer for Defence Unicorns. Heres an example of a cluster repository created and provisioned by the UI: The plugin appears in the Tools section on the Explore pages on Backstage. First of all, its worth clarifying what we mean exactly when we are talking about a service catalog. Manage technical documentation with a docs-like-code solution. This will illustrate how Backstage and Proton can be integrated to bootstrap a new application that deploys a static Nginx workload to ECS Fargate across multiple environments, including a CI/CD pipeline provided by AWS CodePipeline.

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Platform engineers no longer need to use home-grown tools to track updates across their deployed services. This plugin will allow customers to integrate Protons infrastructure templating, provisioning, and lifecycle management into their Backstage portal to reduce platform engineering overhead. In big companies when you need to handle lots of scenarios with different teams working separately, each using different programming languages, things often get quite disconnected. View Jira summary for your projects in Backstage. Easily view and test your gRPC API with a GUI Client, inspired from BloomRPC application. GoCD is an open-source tool which is used in software development to help teams and organizations automate the continuous delivery of software. Google's Lighthouse tool is a great resource for benchmarking and improving the accessibility, performance, SEO, and best practices of your website. Manage all your services and software components, all in one place. Under the hood the profile uses the command line interface, EKSctl with GitHub Actions to provision a Highly Available Kubernetes cluster that includes a preloaded profile within a few minutes. And all in a context where a central Platform team can set predefined rules and golden paths for all other app development teams to operate within. The badges plugin offers a set of badges that can be used outside of Backstage, showing information related to data from the catalog. The project lowers the barrier of entry for organizations to build sophisticated developer portals with an extensible data model and integration capabilities. One of such problems is the templating of the microservices, packages and libs. A unified UI or CLI for developers to self-serve deployments, environments, databases and more. We look at the limitations of service catalogs and how Internal Developer Platforms complement them to unlock true developer self-service. View Bitrise builds and download the build artifacts within Backstage. The thing about backstage is that its very pluggable (Based on ReactJS and NodeJS), so you can customize it to fit your needs. This plugin provides a composable home page, and ability to create home page components. Extend the Backstage Software Catalog with a graph that shows all entities and their relationships providing an easier way to discover the ecosystem. In this post well show you how to use Spotifys open source framework, Backstage to create a GitOps plugin with a UI that can be offered through a developer portal. Load users and groups from Okta into the Backstage catalog. In this blog post, well discuss what these service catalogs are and how they can help your team. Easily view your New Relic Dashboards in Backstage, via real-time snapshots of your dashboards. Although Backstage is built on React, it is relatively easy to understand, even for somebody like me who rarely writes front-end applications. The project is in the incubation stage in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), having moved out of beta with the 1.0 release in March 2022. API Linter is a quality assurance tool that checks the compliance of API's specifications to Zalando's API rules. The concept of the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is becoming increasingly popular as its an innovative way for organizations to boost development velocity and reduce time to market. Most cloud providers tell you to set them, yet members of the original Kubernetes team at Google say not to use them! Learn more about GitOps in our webinar series - GitOps on AWS. Browse 150+ ways of integrating and managing your infrastructure with open source drivers. View Security Insights for your components in Backstage.

Most likely you are asking yourself this question because we described just the beginning of the infra development flow. Splunk On-Call offers a simple way to identify incidents and escalation policies. The IDP provides a set of shared capabilities that provide a standardized way for development teams to deploy applications to production. You create a microservice/lib/package from a template using the UI at hand. Try to imagine that you have over 1000 NodeJs Developers in your company, and each one of them will create a new service from scratch. Create and view AWS Proton services for your components in Backstage. Spotify will offer paid plugins for Backstage in 2022. Spotify open sourced parts of its internal project, Backstage, on GitHub.

Incident management can be challenging and throw you curveballs with unexpected issues, resulting in data loss, downtimes, and overall money & hours of sleep going to waste, BUT! It drives how Backstage aggregates information from disparate information sources for developers to view in a single location. Stay tuned! Were looking forward to seeing how customers can combine Backstage and AWS Proton to power their IDP initiatives, and were excited to evolve this integration as the Backstage project moves forward. Write your docs right alongside your code. Since Backstage and the community have made a large set of ready-to-use React components available it's even easier to build GUIs with a limited background in React. View AWS Lambda functions for your components in Backstage. In this post well show you how to use Spotifys open source framework, Backstage to create a GitOps plugin with a UI that can be offered through a developer portal. Greg discusses Palantirs experience and growing pains in scaling their Apollo Platforms internal use of GitOps to 100+ environments, 500+ unique services and 1000+ engineers. Manage all your services and software components in one place regardless of where they are running. One of the great features of Backstage is Software Templates, the ability for platform engineers to define templates that development teams can use to bootstrap new projects. Hell explain why there is so much controversy over something so simple, and help you determine what is right for your team. Well also look at how top performing engineering organizations combine service catalog functionality with Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) to provide their engineers with an end-to-end development and deployment experience of the highest quality.

Development Experience Teams that are responsible for velocity put together scripts to help create such templates. We want to create a space where everyone shares their experiences and ideas with Backstage, so we can all grow together. Hell talk about the problems encountered, unsuccessful attempts at solving them and ultimately Apollos reimagination of GitOps at Palantir. Provides Stack Overflow specific functionality that can be used in different ways (e.g. Lets take Nodejs for example. Associate alerts and dashboards to components. What do you want to talk about? With a growing number of tools requested by different development teams and an ever-expanding base of services, big enterprise setups are characterized by an increasing lack of transparency and visibility. Backstage not only shines through a rich set of UI components, but it also provides conventions for defining APIs to talk to backend services. Both methods allow users to leverage the underlying architecture in order to develop highly extensible applications. Show workloads, environments and resources deployed by Humanitec Platform Orchestrator. Lately, service catalogs have been coming up in conversations more and more, especially when we speak with mid or large size enterprise accounts. View your cloud carbon footprint by estimating energy use (kilowatt-hours) and carbon emissions (metric tons CO2e) from public cloud usage. Taras and Charles from the Frontside team demonstrate their solution for testing ingestors in Backstage. Plugin authors can contribute user interface elements that can used by platform teams to construct views that are most relevant to development teams. More than that, we want to add all our concerns and standards during the creation process. Because the system is practically self-organizing, it requires considerably less oversight from a centralized Platform team than a normal catalog would. A service catalog answers the question around which service (or fork of it) is consumed by which applications. Richard Pearson, Engineering Manager at Moonpig, facillitated a discussion on how to keep Backstage packages and data up to date. The custom action aws:proton:create-service provided by the Proton plugin allows templates to trigger the creation of a Proton service when a component is created by a development team. Which KPIs change with Internal Developer Platforms, Trusted and vetted partners to support you. Some organizations take this a step further, choosing to engineer a developer portal, which can surface tools and platform capabilities from a unified web interface. Heres a short video overview of Spotify Backstage, one of the most popular platforms: With Backstage the code you create is templated, meaning you dont have to spend any time on boilerplating in your organization. This plugin will show you the cost and resource usage of your application within Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

CodeScene is a multi-purpose tool bridging code, business and people. To request features or improvements to the Proton plugin, you can raise issues in the project GitHub repository or take a look as the AWS Proton service public roadmap. However, I wanted the cluster bootstrapping process to be more GitOps-ish, so this is what I did. the overwhelming amount of options you are presented with every time you open your console. Dominik showed us how to use the Backstage API docs plugin to discover APIs and get rendered documentation from OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and GraphQL schemas.

The cluster.yaml is defined as a YAML config wrapping around the EKSctl ClusterConfig. Zooming in, every service catalog should have some version of these four core elements. Provides a composable home page and the ability to create home page components. CI/CD, local development, many programming languages, the list goes on and on. And how to design those abstraction layers when building your own IDP?

Should you use CPU limits or not? Terraform is the most adopted Infrastructure as Code tool in the market. This lets platform teams define both application code templates, along with its associated Infrastructure-as-Code templates, presented together in a unified workflow for development teams to create new components and services. Automate production readiness, migrations, security audits, and more with CQL (Cortex Query Language). To make the provisioning process start from the GitHub workflow, we can implement the provisioner as a GitHub Action. Thank you! Monitor all your service's deployments at a glance, even across clusters. You can get going with the coding right away, fantastic! Now multiply it by each programming language youre using, and youll get lost. Adding new functionality to the Backstage application is as simple as creating a plugin, defining the plugin url (for example, `/gitops-clusters`), wiring it up to the applications router, and then adding the plugin url to the sidebar. We are very excited to host another session with Bryan Finster, founder and former lead of the Walmart DevOps Dojo. A good service catalog contains a range of information about each service in the enterprise. Thats where IDPs come in. Monitor all your service's deployments at a glance even across clusters. The GitOps loop kicks off after enabling the GitOps functionality with the `eksctl enable gitops` command.

Elrick will introduce use cases and present a UX prototype to use as a starting point of the community discussion. Integrates GraphiQL as a tool to browse GraphQL API endpoints inside Backstage. Create new software components in just a few steps, with your standards built-in (Scaffolder). Backstage gave me a fresh experience for developing complex front-end applications by letting me focus on my essential tasks. To see all the open source plugins built by the Backstage community, visit backstage.io/plugins. What such a setup does not allow you to do however, is running your service. View GitHub Insights for your components in Backstage. Easily run git CLI commands from your scaffolder actions, An action to fire an arbitrary HTTP request. However, these portals can be complex and expensive to develop and maintain since they become a critical piece of infrastructure themselves. Here you can find all Rails related features to improve your scaffolder. In this project, Ill describe exactly how to implement a UI for a GitOps plugin with Backstage and make it available as a tool for spinning up and managing preconfigured machine learning clusters. Writing the live code (environments, states etc) that uses those modules. In this article, we break down what they are and what you should think about, if your team is considering implementing one. Visualize, understand and optimize your team's cloud costs. The first phase of backstage was a UI framework. Developers can get a uniform overview of all their software and related resources (such as server utilisation, data pipelines, pull request status), regardless of how and where they are running, as well as an easy way to onboard and manage those resources. It is common for these platforms to simplify how developers interact with underlying technology, like container orchestrators, and codify organizational standards and best practices in a manner that is easy to consume. Lets look at an example. However, an application also needs infrastructure it can be deployed towhether its a containerized environment like Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service, a set of virtual machines, or some other abstraction. Currently, it supports provisioning EKS clusters on GitHub via GitHub Actions. Natan will go through both sides of the argument. The preloaded profile is a Machine Learning profile and the COVID-ML profile. For example, app developers can create Backstage components that will be registered in the Backstage software catalog through the plugin, powered by AWS Proton service templates. Allows a user to have easy access to pages within a Backstage app by storing them as "shortcuts" in the sidebar. The framework provides many opportunities for developers to create GUIs for Cloud Native applications. Crucially, this means that people in one part of the world can find and utilize the same services that people in other teams use on the other side of the world/enterprise, eliminating the need to develop and support local services. In March 2020 Spotify announced they were releasing an open source version of their own internal service catalog, called Backstage, used by over 280 engineering teams to manage 2,000+ backend services, 300+ websites, 4,000+ data pipelines, and 200+ mobile features. The plugin is called `gitops-profiles` which allows users to provision GitOps-managed clusters directly from Backstage. Service catalogs and Backstage in particular provide enterprise teams with an incredibly useful pane of glass on top of their apps and services. The Proton plugin for Backstage provides one of these interface elements, a condensed view of a Proton service associated with the entity being displayed including its version information, deployment status, and service instances. There are practical things you could do to make it a smoother process and handle it better. Join our community to receive invitations to events, recordings, and networking opportunities among other Backstage users. There are many methods by which organizations can choose to allow developers to interface with a platformfor example using a ticket system that drives automated processes or applying GitOps principles and taking advantage of its associated tooling. Browse TODO comments in your project's source code.

Write your docs right alongside your code. all the plugins built by the Backstage community.

View Snyk scanned vulnerabilities and license compliance of your components directly in Backstage. Join this webinar with Viktor Farcic, host of the Youtube channel DevOps Toolkit and co-host of DevOps Paradox. Finally, the service catalog allows Ops teams to know at a glance which versions of a particular service are used by which applications and in which environments. Service catalogs like Spotify Backstage are all the rage. Lets look at Terraform, the most common IaC for creating resources with several cloud providers. The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. This lets platform engineers use Proton to view deployment versions and push updates. With an IDP, Ops teams can wire up their whole setup and orchestrate their infrastructure from one control pane.

Backstage gives teams a very straightforward method to unify all of your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation under a single, easy-to-use interface. Manage releases without having to juggle git commands. Open source plugins that you can add to your Backstage deployment. Any engineer in the organization can now easily search all existing services through Backstage, consume what they need or spin up a new service with a predefined architecture and design, using the 10s of available plugins to document it, track its resource consumption and overall health or identify its dependencies. Iain talked about the architecture behind Roadie's SASS product Backstage as a service. A critical part of a successful IDP is the ability for development teams to self-servewhether this be infrastructure provisioning, application deployments, or even kicking off new servicesreducing load on platform teams who can then reinvest in platform capabilities and standards rather than repetitive processes. View Argo CD status for your projects in Backstage. From here we create an artifact (a thing we called Terraform image) and deploy it via Backstage to cloud providers in a gradual deployment manner. All of that can be handled via the template engine of Backstage. I previously built a GitOps workflow for EKS with GitHub Actions and intended to write a user interface for it, however Im not a front-end developer. There are many problems with development experience in big organizations. Backstage is a framework that unifies the UX of your frequently used infrastructure tools and makes them available from a service catalogue. What is Dynamic Configuration Management?

This includes information such as ownership (typically pointing to a specific individual or team), programming language, source code, current version, last update, documentation. These templates will typically seed a new source code repository with a basic skeleton application, perhaps also including related artifacts like a Dockerfile and CI/CD pipeline.

The following is a snippet of a Backstage template that leverages the action: You can see a full example of a software template that leverages this action here.