We are constantly exploring innovative ways to enhance our service delivery and empower our customers to achieve more. Our latest venture into Backstage, an open-source developer portal created by Spotify, is set to redefine how we and our customers manage software development lifecycles, visualize dependencies, and scale seamlessly. Here's a look at what Backstage brings to the table, how we’re using it, and why it’s a game-changer for our customers.
What is Backstage?
Backstage is more than just a developer portal. It’s a centralized hub designed to streamline software development by organizing and visualizing projects, systems, APIs, and documentation. Initially built by Spotify to tackle their challenges of scaling development teams, Backstage has evolved into a powerful open-source tool that fosters collaboration, enforces standards, and drives efficiency.
With Backstage, you can:
- Visualize relationships between services, dependencies, and APIs
- Centralize documentation, making it easily accessible for teams
- Automate project bootstrapping and management using templates
- Enhance governance with a clear view of ownership and lifecycle stages
How base2Services is Using Backstage
We’re leveraging Backstage to reimagine how we manage environments, support customer development workflows, and empower our own teams. Here’s a detailed look at how we’re implementing this game-changing platform:
1. Modeling and Managing Customer Domains
At base2Services, every customer is unique, and their software environments are often complex. Using Backstage, we model each customer as a "domain" within the platform, allowing us to:
- Centralize Customer Data: All customer environments, services, APIs, and dependencies are visualized in one interface.
- Drill Down into Details: Within a customer domain, we can view relationships between systems, ownership structures, and the status of individual components.
- Monitor Holistically: By integrating customer data from their own Backstage instances, we maintain a complete, centralized view across all customer domains.
This model enables our team to proactively monitor customer environments, quickly diagnose issues, and better understand how different services interact within their ecosystems.
2. Standardized Templates for Efficiency
Backstage allows us to create and provide customizable, standardized templates that simplify and streamline workflows for both our teams and our customers. These templates include:
- Infrastructure Setup: Automating the creation of environments like AWS CloudFormation stacks, Amazon ECS clusters, or Amazon VPCs.
- Service Bootstrapping: Enabling developers to quickly set up new microservices, APIs, or web applications with prebuilt configurations.
- Documentation Templates: Ensuring consistency in project documentation and making it easy for teams to onboard or share knowledge.
- CI/CD Pipeline Creation: Automatically generating Jenkins or GitHub Actions pipelines as part of the project setup.
By providing these templates, we enable our customers to self-service their deployments while adhering to industry best practices. This not only saves time but also ensures consistency and quality across projects.
3. Automating Workflows and Reducing Manual Effort
Backstage integrates seamlessly with tools like GitHub, Jenkins, and AWS, enabling us to automate complex workflows. For example:
- Project Bootstrapping: A developer can create a fully configured project - including documentation, pipelines, and dependencies - in just minutes.
- CI/CD Pipeline Automation: Pipelines are automatically linked to GitHub repositories, ensuring code changes trigger builds, tests, and deployments.
- Pull Request Automation: When a service or template is updated, Backstage generates pull requests to ensure environments are updated without manual intervention.
These automations reduce the burden on teams, freeing them to focus on delivering features rather than managing infrastructure or repetitive tasks.
4. Enhancing Visibility and Governance
With Backstage, we gain unparalleled visibility into our customers’ environments and services. Key benefits include:
- Ownership Tracking: Every service, component, and API is linked to its owner, ensuring clear accountability and faster resolution of issues.
- Dependency Mapping: Relationships between services and APIs are visualized, helping teams understand how changes in one area may impact others.
- Lifecycle Management: Components are tagged with lifecycle states (e.g., production, experimental, deprecated), providing clear guidance on their current status.
This enhanced visibility ensures that both we and our customers can operate with confidence, knowing exactly how systems interact and who is responsible for maintaining them.
5. Integrating Monitoring and Deployment Tools
Backstage’s extensible framework allows us to integrate with popular monitoring and deployment tools. Some highlights include:
- AWS Integration: By connecting to Amazon ECS, AWS CloudFormation, and other AWS services, we can visualize deployments, track resource usage, and monitor environments directly within Backstage.
- Datadog: Integration with monitoring platforms provides real-time insights into system health and performance.
- Kubernetes: For customers using Amazon EKS or other Kubernetes platforms, Backstage can pull data directly from clusters, showing the state of pods, deployments, and services.
These integrations allow us to provide richer insights and a more streamlined experience for customers, helping them manage their infrastructure more effectively.
6. Centralized Knowledge Management
Backstage serves as a hub for all documentation, making it easily accessible to developers and teams. We ensure:
- API Documentation: Customers can see which APIs their services provide or consume, with detailed specs and the ability to test APIs directly within Backstage.
- Service Documentation: Centralized project documentation ensures consistency and fosters better collaboration between teams.
- Live Updates: Documentation is linked to GitHub repositories, so changes are immediately reflected in Backstage.
This centralized approach reduces friction in development, minimizes onboarding time for new team members, and ensures everyone is working from the same playbook.
7. Self-Service Empowerment for Customers
Our customers want the freedom to deploy and manage their environments without delays. With Backstage, we deliver a self-service model that:
- Empowers Developers: Teams can create, deploy, and manage services without relying on DevOps support for every step.
- Speeds Time-to-Delivery: From idea to production-ready service, the process is simplified and streamlined.
- Maintains Standards: Even as customers self-service their needs, our templates and guardrails ensure best practices are followed.
This self-service model aligns with our commitment to empowering customers while maintaining security, scalability, and efficiency.
8. Custom Plugins for Enhanced Functionality
We are building custom plugins to extend Backstage’s capabilities, including:
- Customer Portal Integration: Integrating Backstage with our own customer portal for a unified view of their environments.
- Deployment Visualization: Adding plugins to show which environments specific services are deployed to and their current state.
- Advanced Reporting: Providing insights into usage, health, and performance metrics across customer domains.
These plugins enable us to offer tailored solutions that meet the specific needs of each customer, enhancing their experience and delivering greater value.
By integrating Backstage into our operations and customer environments, we’re not only improving efficiency but also setting a new standard for visibility, governance, and scalability. This comprehensive approach ensures our customers are empowered to innovate while we continue to deliver exceptional service and support.
Why This Matters for Our Customers
Backstage is a fantastic tool for organizations looking to streamline development and operational processes, and base2Services have tailored it to elevate the experience for our customers. Our focus on DevOps as a Service and expertise in AWS allow us to deliver solutions that enhance efficiency, scalability, and innovation for development teams.
One of the key benefits Backstage provides is the ability to empower development teams with self-service capabilities. By utilizing prebuilt templates available directly from base2Services’ repository of templates, developers can quickly and consistently bootstrap projects, deploy infrastructure, and set up new services. These templates, which include configurations for AWS services like Amazon ECS clusters, AWS CloudFormation stacks, and Amazon VPC setups, ensure that projects adhere to industry best practices while minimizing manual effort. With these tools, teams can focus on innovation rather than being bogged down by repetitive tasks.
Backstage also supports faster time-to-market by automating key elements of the development lifecycle. From pipeline creation to deployment, workflows are designed to reduce friction and ensure smooth operations, especially within complex AWS-based environments. This means that developers can start with a solid foundation built on proven standards, reducing errors and increasing efficiency.
Collaboration is another area where Backstage excels. It centralizes documentation, making critical information easily accessible to teams. This ensures that all stakeholders, from developers to operational teams, have a clear understanding of the dependencies, ownership, and status of services. For customers using our DevOps as a Service, this visibility is invaluable in aligning development efforts with business objectives.
Moreover, the base2Services and Backstage governance features provide an added layer of confidence. With clear ownership tracking and lifecycle management of components, teams can manage projects proactively and ensure long-term maintainability. This is particularly crucial for AWS environments, where complexity can grow quickly without proper oversight.
In essence, Backstage allows us to extend the capabilities of our DevOps as a Service offering, enabling our customers to leverage the power of AWS more effectively. By combining automation, centralized knowledge, and prebuilt templates from our repository, we help teams achieve their goals faster while maintaining the highest standards of quality and scalability.
What’s Next?
base2Services see Backstage as more than just a tool - it’s a platform for innovation. We’re continuously exploring ways to enhance its capabilities through custom plugins, deeper integrations, and tailored templates. For our customers, this means staying ahead of the curve with solutions that not only meet their current needs but also anticipate future challenges.
We are building a better way to build software. It’s another step in our mission to simplify complexity and empower our customers to focus on what they do best: driving their businesses forward. Request a demo to see it in action
Let’s Build Together
Curious about how Backstage can transform your development processes? Reach out to us today and let’s explore how we can put its power to work for your business. Together, we can create a developer experience that’s efficient, collaborative, and future-ready.
