The concept of platform engineering and the end-to-end developer experience is a burgeoning topic industry wide. Building an IdP (Internal Developer Portal) is extremely complex. This topic is new for many, and there are still a lot of unknowns regarding how to evolve an organization that has no, or a low, concept of internal platforms.
Enter Backstage. Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation by Spotify. Backstage has a vibrant ecosystem that development teams successfully use to streamline and rapidly onboard applications. It provides a portal into an internal developer platform by delivering an application catalog that can aggregate several sources of information regarding applications.
Backstage is becoming a standard for developer scaffolding. Building this type of platform to fit into your environment is both complex and time consuming. Knowledge around Backstage is still hard to find. Organizations are looking for a standardized approach on how to implement and adopt Backstage. We have seen an increased interest in Backstage by our Red Hat customers. We have a number of consulting engagements targeting building IdPs and implementing Backstage, which will allow Red Hat to accumulate significant expertise on how to best guide when building their developer platforms.
We believe that developers are force multipliers, and their productivity correlates with the ability of organizations to generate revenue, launch new features, and capitalize on opportunities. But navigating the complexity of a modern Kubernetes-native ecosystem is hard. They need the best tools to have access not only to APIs, but also to documentation and content, software development kits (SDKs), debugging tools, monitoring and tracing tools, and user interfaces that help them with their tasks at hand.
Red Hat today announces that it will join the backstage.io community. We will bring our own expertise and customer experiences together with a community of partners and open source projects to improve developer experience on Red Hat OpenShift. OpenShift and Kubernetes are critical to our customers, and we want to provide developer tools that make it easier and more productive for your teams to build services and applications along with lowering the cognitive burden of navigating a Kubernetes-native application development world.
With Red Hat’s experience in building, contributing to, and expanding open source projects into industry standards supported by development resources and leadership, we hope to make significant contributions to backstage.io for the advancement of its industry adoption.
As a first step, we are making available a Helm chart that gets Backstage up and running in both an OpenShift deployment as well as a vanilla K8s environment. What starts with a small step is the beginning of the adventure of bringing Backstage into the OpenShift ecosystem and on a collaborative path to an enterprise-supported developer platform for OpenShift developers.
We invite you to help the community to enhance developer productivity and create the best developer experience for the next generation of developers. Subscribe to the Backstage Discord deployment channel for community discussions around our new Helm chart contribution. Stay tuned for additional blog posts and information to be released soon!
Last updated: October 25, 2022