Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

Hi, is anyone using <http://backstage.io|backstage.io>? If so, what are your thoughts on the tool?

Related: <https://platformengin-b0m7058.slack.com/archives/C037XDKEDNW/p1653486647591469>

We have built our developer platform on top of <http://backstage.io|backstage>. Let me know if you are looking for any specifics. Happy to provide more details. 

Hi Ramesh :wave: that sounds awesome! I'm in the very early stages of POC'ing the tool but it looks very cool. The key aspects I'm looking for are:

• Providing a central software catalogue for our apps, components, and services.
• Docs as code.
• Golden path / templates for new services.
Some of the secondary features I think will also be useful are the 'single pane of glass' approach of linking the service to the team with all of the observability, build, deploy, cycle time info in one place.

Before I get too carried away, my next steps are to install this on something a little more substantial than my laptop and to start playing with the basic features.

I'd be keen to understand, where did you start? How did you build your implementation up?

IMHO the capabilities of backstage can be useful, but organizational aspects are more important. By which I mean, making it a priority across the org to keep the catalog up to date, establishing a culture of docs and metadata that can be attached to the catalog entries, etc.

very true, no point in implementing a tool if its not adopted.

<@U031K473QA1> I am trying to understand at what order of magnitude this platform is worth the effort. Can I ask how many developers are you supporting. is that 10s, 100s or 1000s?

Total development engineering size is 400+ 

In general I agree with the comment “if no traction from development then no point in developing a platform/tool” but it's also equally important to evangelize these new tools/platforms based on the problems that developers are facing day to day. In my case, we have conducted survey to understand top 3-5 challenges developers facing w.r.t cloud delivery and the survey results helped us to go backstage/IdP route. 

<@U03DVC5DZFZ> we have started with simple service catalog 9 months ago to provide full visibility into micro services to all devs i.e service owner, source code repo (ro access) , CICD (gitlab) , PagerDuty and code coverage etc. 

Now, we have 600+ micro services in catalog , docs,10 templates/sdks, cloud costs insights, DORA metrics and DevOPs scorecards. 

So far our focus has been providing visibility …now team is working on backend layer which would enable us to perform write operations like triggering deployment pipelines, provisioning GCP/AWS resources from backstage etc. 

awesome, sounds good. How have you found working with the tool so far, is it east to setup and configure for the various plugins?

It’s probably OK if you are familiar with the typescript+nodejs ecosystem. Plugins are hit and miss - in general, you probably won’t get the platform you want without a fair amount of customization.