I’m not sure who the customer is for Backstage.<p>For a small startup, poking around in the gcp/aws console works well enough. Maintaining another console layer on top of that feels like one more thing that could break.<p>If you’re a big company with a team that could support developer platform tools, you probably have some sort of portal system hacked together and you’ll never be able to change because somebody has a critical dependency on the old system
It is tough to keep two widely different businesses under one roof. One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup.<p>Spotify should spin off Backstage as a separate company, providing the initial IP and funding and being the first client.<p>Many companies, like Uber, created a lot of useful infra, though they failed to monetize it. They could take a cut in the Chronosphere (M3) and Temporal (Cadence).<p>Much better than laying off people, though origin companies would need to be smart, without being too greedy.<p>Though the model is unproven.
Has anyone successfully implemented Backstage at their company? How'd it go?<p>We're looking at it for an internal platform serving ~50 engineers today, spanning mobile, backend, enterprise integrations, and ML teams. The hope is it'll make it easier to spin up new things "the right way" without e.g. ML PhDs having to learn Helm and K8s, plus other goodies like nice docs.
The 'single pane of glass' is pretty seductive and there are a lot of tools that try to sell that vision. Backstage looks a pretty good swing with their modular/flexible approach, though I haven't used it.<p>The problem you end up having is that (for example) Google docs is really good for writing and commenting on docs, and a general purpose tool is never going to be as good as Google docs for docs. You could write a "Google Docs" plugin and just link out to a project's google doc but then you're just a link aggregator which offers limited usefulness.
<p><pre><code> Backstage is built on a modular, plug-in based architecture that allows engineers to layer-up their developer portal to meet their own needs.
</code></pre>
Frankly, this is just incorrect. Just read the configuration guide for "installing" a plugin to see what I mean. You have to modify the source code of your own deployment in several places. That's not a plugin based architecture.<p><a href="https://backstage.io/docs/getting-started/configure-app-with-plugins/" rel="nofollow">https://backstage.io/docs/getting-started/configure-app-with...</a><p>Additionally, check out what it takes to stand up a standalone backstage server. You used to have to clone their repo if I remember right, but now they give you a starter template via npx and leave it up to you to put all of the pieces together. They don't even ship a docker image to get you started.<p><a href="https://backstage.io/docs/getting-started/" rel="nofollow">https://backstage.io/docs/getting-started/</a><p>Frankly, the architecture of Backstage is ill-conceived and a hassle to operate. If you have the budget their are vendors that will deal with all of this for you. I think the concept of Backstage is fine, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
people who are using DataDog, how does it compare to DataDog service catalogs? If I want to use Backstage what kind of value add it provides over observability tools with cataloging tools?
I saw link to backstage some time ago, but I could not figure out what it's supposed to provide. Can someone explain what it does / what do you use it for?
I’ve always thought Backstage seemed like an interesting solution to existing god awful “solutions” many enterprise type companies subject their devs to. For example, PostHog, Swagger.
I think one of the largest problems they will face is their consumer not having the same culture as them, and what worked wonderfully for them failing in other orgs.
My employer is considering using backstage for our data infrastructure tooling. This makes me nervous because Spotify seems unable to program a reliable shuffle feature on their player. Maybe it's because they put all the good devs on backstage?
Please don’t use “IDP”, we really already have that (for chrissakes we have like four of them in our “enterprise IT”). They can have SAML also, “Spotify: Acronym’s Mine, Losers”.