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

Hey Roberto! We currently have an internal site that hosts tools, requires us to write the backend and frontend. We’re kicking the tires on <https://retool.com/|Retool> right now, my colleagues that are trialing it have very positive things to say so far.

If you’re talking about service discovery, we’re talking about a service catalog in the near term, but still undecided on priority/timing

What are you guys doing right now?

Built our own self-service portal that points to other apps. We still keep an eye on backstage and others

I'd be interested to hear the feedback as well.

Hi! We are setting up Backstage as the software catalogue and entry point to all dev tools

Thanks for the inputs <@U02RCRP2XGT> amd <@U02J9CZVB5F> Have you seen <http://opslevel.com|opslevel.com> as an alternative to Backstage? Or what is the main reason to use Sootify Backstage compared to Retool/Backstage? 

Backstage has an enormous community and is open source and is modular. Opslevel is new to me haven't seen the functionality. Retool seems handy. My constraint is no cloud so it removes a lot of options for me

i'd be happy to see comparisons between tools like this

Hi Roberto, we haven't evaluated <http://opslevel.com|opslevel.com>, we saw Clutch and Roadie and then finally decided for Backstage mainly because it is open source, has a clear documentation, can include entities, plugins, and it has been tested in a big company (Spotify)

we have a homegrown IDP (internal development portal) that was heavily influenced by backstage

Thanks for the amazing response :) :pray:

&gt; Or what is the main reason to use Sootify Backstage compared to Retool/Backstage?
<@U02T44E10NL> I would say that Backstage and Retool solve different problems.

Backstage’s primary use cases are
1. improving discoverability of resources and assets on a development platform
2. making these assets searchable
3. allowing scaffolding of new components
4. and ultimately to become a single glass pane for developer experience
Retool, from my understanding, is designed to make it easier for developers in an organization to create and maintain internal tools.

Backstage comes with a framework for building plugins, but Retool provides way more tooling for making custom apps.

Backstage’s goal is to host a growing number of plugins that make it possible to integrate with external systems into Backstage with little development.

I hope this helps.