Category: Internal Developer Platforms

Interview: Internal Developer Platforms – Self-Service Portals for Increased Productivity?

In the last two blog posts, we have introduced Software Templates including Backstage and Scaffolder. When using Scaffolder, you can easily create custom workflows and design some user interface forms with the built-in mechanism. Backstage already provider a lot of built-in actions that can be used in Scaffolder workflows.

After having introduced Software Templates in the last step, it is now time to cover some details about working with the Scaffolder and espacially with parameters and steps.

In the last few blog posts, we dived into the core functionalities and features of Backstage. That included the Backstage Software Catalog, Backstage Search, or Techdocs. Another great part of Backstage is the Software Template functionality and we will cover that in this and the next blog posts.

In the last blog post, we showed how to publish the API of a simple Spring REST Application and provide an API documentation in a OpenAPI/Swagger way. In this blog post, we will extend the example and show how to integrate Backstage TechDocs.

In the last blog post, we discussed the various entity types within Backstage’s Software Catalog. As the plain theory is sometimes quite abstract, we will continue with an concrete example and show how to publish the API of a simple Java Spring REST service in Backstage and publish its API in the OpenAPI specification format within Backstage.

In the last blog post, we have shown how to register Software Entities into the Software Catalog and have found out that there are different kind of entities.
As a recap, the Backstage Software Catalog is a centralized system designed to manage and track ownership and metadata for all software within an ecosystem, including services, websites, libraries, and data pipelines. This catalog uses metadata YAML files, stored with the code, which are collected and displayed in Backstage, facilitating easy management and visualization.

After having described how to install Backstage, we want finally show how to work with Backstage. In this blog post, we will focus on software templates and the Backstage Search.

In the last blog post, we talked a lot of the installation and the architecture of Backstage. We also gave some design considerations for the Kubernetes installation. Now it is time to come up with some details for the Kubernetes installation. 

After having discussed the main use cases in the last blog post, let’s now continue with some internals. In this blog post, we will discuss the architecture and the installation of Backstage.