Some companies experience quick growth and notice problems that, on small scale weren’t bothering as much but with growth they start to take a toll. Spotify is one of those companies, and one thing they noticed is that when the developers are overwhelmed trying to learn Infrastructure as Code (IAC), what is already being used in cloud providers, what APIs the company have, etc. With that, the on-boarding process becomes slower, development process becomes slower and more error-prone, duplication can happen and cost control gets messier.
How Spotify solved that
Spotify tried to unify that in a single place, making it easier for:
- Platform / DevOps / Operations / Infrastructure teams to have more control over the infrastructure and cloud services;
- Developers to create, find and document APIs and services;
- Managers to visualize and have an overview of what all teams are making
That’s called Backstage, a developer platform that unifies it all. After it’s huge success, Spotify donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it is fast growing ever since.
Why would Spotify open source this?
The big thing behind Backstage are the plugins, which are made by the community. With them it’s possible to make Backstage completely bias free, customizing every bit of information to your company’s needs.
Here are some cool examples of plugins I’ve found:
- Analytics: integration with Google Analytics to see events and data.
- Grafana: visual components of dashboards and alerts.
- Datadog: visual components of graphs and dashboards.
- Snyk: visual components of project vulnerabilities.
There are a lot of other plugins, they are all listed here. Also, it is possible to create your own plugins, completely custom for your company, adding any information you may find useful.
Some cool uses of Backstage
- Keep track of all services / projects
- Unified place for docs
- Project templates to make the add an abstraction layer and make development process faster
- Manage CI/CD pipelines
It’s really easy to get creative and think of a lot of cool ideas, plugins and uses of Backstage.
My thoughts
Being a developer who has worked in big companies, I find it really cool that Spotify saw their problems and found a great solution for them. Also, being a fan of open source community, I think the power that plugins built by community add to Backstage is an awesome feature that people should really look for. Maybe if your company is using Backstage and you created a custom plugin, think about open sourcing it!