How Backstage streamlines software development and increases efficiency

The power of Backstage lies in the organization that it can bring to your software development lifecycle. It acts as an abstraction layer to the complexity of provisioning and deploying microservices that are both consistent and compliant. From specifying business units, domains, teams and other information about your developer landscape, Backstage can start associating those resources together. Those associations happen regardless of where the code might live. Different repositories? No problem. Different EMUs? No big deal. If you can express the structure of your organization to Backstage using its easy-to-learn taxonomy, Backstage will help you tame complexity, bringing organization to your developer teams.

Organizational boundaries between developer teams might make dependencies seem opaque, but because Backstage expresses those relationships automatically inside its system, there’s no more worrying about loose ends. Backstage will map out the picture for you in an intuitive way. Infrastructure teams no longer need to lose time to constant custom provisioning requests from disparate groups; the menu is right in front of everyone.

The reasons for adopting a developer portal include:

• Centralized tooling by providing one spot to access and use tooling.
• Improved collaboration with a shared environment for accessing, sharing and managing software components.
• Enhanced discoverability of components and resources for reuse, reducing duplication of work and creating more consistent practices.
• Standardization by providing templates and best practices for service creation.
• Automation and integration  for routine tasks through integration with various CI/CD and monitoring tools, including through a growing community of plug-ins.
• Visibility and governance into the software development lifecycle through insight to project status, dependencies and more.
• Developer experience through simplification in project management, collaboration with team members and access to tooling that promotes higher productivity and job satisfaction.

Backstage allows developers and teams to express the metadata about their projects from yaml files. Those yaml files are written to look like Kubernetes resources, so developers can quickly and easily create them. Since the yaml files are versioned(because they’re in Git), this also means they always should express the most current information about your repos. Now, imagine the scenario where a project is consolidated into another project. For Backstage, this is no problem. Because the Backstage yaml files (which have the information about the project) become part of the normal release cycle, as your code is updated, so is Backstage.

By putting our Backstage configuration into the repository and making it a normal part of the release cycle, updates to Backstage happen almost automatically. This automation of  updating documentation and advertising  gives time back to the developers. This leads to increased developer productivity and seamless organizational communications.

Another great feature is how Backstage manages microservices. Instead of consuming existing APIs, Backstage can act as an API proxy .

Backstage’s API functionality helps bridge the gap between microservices. Imagine that an application is made of five different microservices. Backstage can put all those behind an API proxy, which will help present them as a single microservice. This is like APIGEE or APIM, but “in-house.” Rather than paying a cloud to host that proxy for you, you can move that proxy into Backstage and present it as a single product.

Backstage also offers templates that help accelerate development. Not only do templates advertise best practices and standards that your org has adopted, but Backstage also helps developers get started by creating repositories for them. Templates can also codify workflows.

If your organization has a workflow where developers can create new Kubernetes clusters in the “Dev Project,” Backstage will empower developers to build their environments without having to learn about Terraform. Templates can also be used to interface with workflows because templates are written in Typescript. Complex workflows can be captured in templates, such as requiring a Service Now ticket to be in an approved state before allowing the deployment.

Instead of having a developer perform hours of rework because the project did not meet organizational standards, the template functionality in Backstage can ensure the repository is created correctly. Backstage templates also save developer time by decomposing changes and workflows into easy-to-consume forms.

While this post discusses just a handful of practical examples of how IBM® can drive efficiency gains in your enterprise through internal developer portals like Backstage, it’s hard to question the impact developers can have on a business: