Is anyone here using Backstage? Could you share your cost experiences with it? Based on my current estimates for the engineering time required to implement the tool, it appears it might be more expensive than purchasing another IDP directly.

Hey Wawad, We're also using Backstage here at Solution Gorilla. We've found it to be a valuable tool for improving developer productivity and self-service for our customers. Regarding costs, our experience has been couple of hours of backstage work excluding the setup of the surrunding components required by the plugins we covers. Feel free to PM me if you want to know more Best, Alex

You can also check out this article by @Taras Mankovski

Thank you @Sam Barlien and @Alexandre Proulx. I have registered for the webinar.

We use Backstage too. There was some upfront work in getting it up but not an overwhelming amount. The vast majority of the time we spent was building templates and automation for backstage’s scaffolder to make the self-service work. I’d say its paid off for us. It used to take teams a week or two to get a service into production and they all ended up with unnecessary nuances. Now it’s less than an hour from start to finish which is a small form in backstage, a terraform PR (opened by backstage) that needs to be applied via atlantis (i.e. github comments) and a PR that just needs to be merged for the new service. There is some maintenance to our templates but that’s not backstage specific. We’ve tried to move logic into shared libraries to reduce it so that its mostly version bumps and services can update to the latest without too much hassle. The updates to backstage itself are generally really easy (they give you a command and diff of any files that need to change). I think in a year and half there have only been 2 updates that required any significant effort due to major version updates of dependencies or major changes to backstage itself.

Keeping backstage up to date is part of what Kaspar talks. If you want to see keeping the UI up to date automatically via a platform we do that with Kratix (yes I am part of the team that builds Kratix! This is just an example of what is possible given Backstage is orchestrated via CRDs)