How Backstage simplifies software development and increases efficiency

Even the best organizations face challenges with the scale and scope of governance and streamlining resources effectively across the enterprise. These challenges can lead to a frustrating, fragmented, and disconnected developer experience.

Meanwhile, different groups of developers within an organization inevitably offer different views on what a single, centralized code base and toolset should look like. It is important to align different good faith standards while allowing developers to achieve efficiencies across silos and organizational boundaries. Developer portals like Backstage can help.

The power of the developer portal

The power of Backstage lies in the organization it can bring to the software development lifecycle. It serves as an abstraction layer for the complexities of provisioning and deploying consistent, compliant microservices. From specifying the business unit, domain, team, and other information about your developer environment, Backstage can begin connecting those resources together. These connections occur regardless of where the code resides. Another repository? are you okay. Other EMUs? It’s no big deal. If you can express your organization’s structure to Backstage using an easy-to-learn taxonomy, Backstage will help alleviate complexity and bring organization to your developer team.

Organizational boundaries between developer teams can make dependencies seem opaque, but Backstage automatically expresses these relationships internally within the system, so you no longer have to worry about loose ends. Backstage lets you draw in an intuitive way. Infrastructure teams no longer have to waste time with constant custom provisioning requests from different groups. The menu is right in front of everyone.

Here are some reasons to adopt a developer portal:

• centralized teaflowing By providing one point from which tools can be accessed and used.
• Improving SeedCooperation There is a shared environment for accessing, sharing, and managing software components.
• improved dSearchability Reduce duplication of work and create more consistent practices by using components and resources for reuse.
• standardization Provides templates and best practices for creating services.
• automation and meintegrated Perform everyday tasks through integrations with a variety of CI/CD and monitoring tools, including a growing community of plugins.
• clock and goverabundance Understand the software development lifecycle with insights into project status, dependencies, and more.
• developer Eexperience Through access to tools that simplify project management, collaborate with team members, and promote higher productivity and job satisfaction.

GitOps for repository data

Backstage allows developers and teams to express metadata about their projects in yaml files. These yaml files are written to look like Kubernetes resources, so developers can create them quickly and easily. Because yaml files are versioned (since they are in Git), this means they should always represent the most up-to-date information about the repository. Now imagine a scenario where your project is merged into another project. For Backstage, this is not an issue. The Backstage yaml file containing information about your project becomes part of the regular release cycle, so when your code is updated, Backstage is also updated.

By putting your Backstage configuration into a repository and making it a regular part of your release cycle, Backstage updates become almost automatic. Document updates and ad automation give developers time back. This increases developer productivity and allows for smoother organizational communication.

As a backstage assistant manager

Another great feature is how Backstage manages microservices. Instead of using an existing API, Backstage can act as an API proxy.

Backstage’s API capabilities help bridge the gap between microservices. Imagine that your application consists of five different microservices. Backstage allows you to place everything behind an API proxy and deliver it as a single microservice. This is similar to APIGEE or APIM, but “in-house”. Instead of paying for the cloud to host that proxy, you can move that proxy into Backstage and offer it as a single product.

This also helps with microservices distributed across two different clouds. Instead of maintaining two sets of routable endpoints to make up one application, Backstage helps provide a “single pane of glass” to those who want to use the service.

The benefit here is that Backstage now facilitates proxy display. Have you ever sat and waited for a firewall ticket to open or a service account to be created? Or have you experienced a service outage due to one of the many APIs that relies on a changed version? Hosting your API proxy on Backstage solves these problems so you can focus more on development.

Benefits of Templates

Backstage also provides templates to help speed up development. Not only do templates advertise the best practices and standards adopted by your organization, Backstage also helps developers get started by creating those repositories. Templates can also codify workflows.

If your organization has a workflow that allows developers to create new Kubernetes clusters in a “Dev Project”, Backstage helps developers build environments without having to learn Terraform. Since the templates are written in Typescript, they can also be used to interface with workflows. Complex workflows can be captured as templates. Service now Tickets must be approved before allowing distribution.

Instead of having your developers do hours of rework because a project doesn’t meet your organizational standards, Backstage’s template feature can help you ensure that your repository is created correctly. Backstage templates also save developers time by breaking down changes and workflows into easy-to-use forms.

Why do you care about developer efficiency?

In this post, we discuss some real-world examples of how IBM® can drive increased efficiency in enterprises through internal developer portals like Backstage, but it’s hard to question the impact developers can have on your business. .

• Developers have the potential to increase global GDP by $3 trillion over the next decade. This potential stems from the technology sector’s role as a force multiplier, highlighting the importance of effectively leveraging existing software engineering talent to drive economic growth and innovation.

• Access to skilled developers is increasingly seen as a constraint to company growth, more so than access to capital. Of the more than 1,000 C-suite executives surveyed, 55% cited access to talent as a constraint, with software engineers (53%) citing it more often than access to capital (52%).

• On average, developers spend 13.5 of their 41.1 hours per week working on technical debt and an additional 3.8 hours fixing bad code. This results in significant productivity losses and nearly $85 billion wasted globally every year due to time spent on bad code and maintenance issues.

With IBM, you can empower your developers and bring standardization and efficiency to your software development lifecycle.

Contact IBM today to discuss the capabilities of Backstage.