How Backstage Alleviates Developer Pain Points

In organizations with large developer communities or an abundance of technical implementations, having a complete knowledge of what the organization already has – versus what needs to be built or purchased – can be a real challenge.

Developers often ask themselves a few key questions as their organization grows:

• “Do we have APIs that already exist for us to utilize or extend, or do we need to build them from scratch?”
• “Do we have a standardized template for creating new project repositories with our best practices and chosen tech already set-up?”
• “Where can I find documentation for the services we have already built?”

This is where Backstage comes in

Backstage is a developer portal, created by Spotify, that aims to make tackling these problems considerably more manageable. Built of top of modern technologies such as Node.js and React, Backstage alleviates the pain points that come from having a large developer community.

A number of features make Backstage ideal for your new developer portal:

• It’s extensible: Backstage is built on top of the React Framework, for its frontend, and Node.js, for its backend. The UI is fully customizable, out of the box, and can be modified by frontend developers to customize the user experience. In addition, Backstage has an extensive plugin system for both the frontend and the backend, allowing applications to be built inside Backstage – utilizing the hooks provided by Backstage, such as authentication, config, and proxying. This allows multiple teams to integrate plugins into Backstage, independently, providing a centralized platform for their work.
• Its catalog: One of Backstage’s core features is its catalog. This catalog is essentially a centralized location for discovering numerous organizational assets, from project templates, and existing APIs, to reusable UI components or any other assets that may be useful.
• Centralized documentation: Backstage is an excellent platform for centralizing documents. Documentation can be updated to the same location as the code for the platform, making it easier to roll out.
• Third-party plugins: A number of third-party plugins exist from major platforms that can provide seamless integrations into the systems you already own. From Gitlab to Atlassian, to Azure, and AWS, and Kubernetes, there should be a plugin that makes it easy to integrate out of the box. If it doesn’t exist, custom in-house plugins can also be built to fill any gaps.

Plan, build, deploy and maintain

This is just a taste of what can be achieved with Backstage. Here at Synechron, we know exactly how to work with you to plan, build, deploy and maintain your developer portal, utilizing Backstage to its fullest. Whether you’re utilizing the out of the box functionality provided by Backstage, branding your platform, or building custom plugins, we can help.