Internal developer portals
Helping internal developer portals get more done in less time has become a priority for organizations. As SaaS becomes more widespread and DevOps becomes more popular, companies are finding that they need to down skill developers, who often need to understand all the microservices available to them.
While this problem was initially solved with service catalogs, the group evolved into something more ambitious: a store that gives manufacturers access to all the microservices and tools in their ecosystem.
The so-called Internal Developer Portal category is rapidly expanding on the following sites: Software companies are trying to develop developer portals and therefore increase productivity. According to Forrester, 87% of DevOps leaders agree that improving productivity is a top priority in the next 12 months.
According to Gartner, “These portals allow software engineering managers to create multiple “app stores” that “increase software reuse, improve the developer portals experience, streamline software delivery, and help share knowledge.”
But these developer portals do not appear out of nowhere. Their results are closely related to other different fields. the result of platform engineering. Simply put, a platform engineering team is “a group with a specific mission within a larger organization .” Shomik Ghosh, a partner at Bold start Ventures, told TechCrunch+:
Platform engineering teams are becoming more common in large organizations, such as internal developer portals Gartner predicts that 80% of software engineering organizations will be in the pipeline by 2026 It predicts that it will have a team platform, and by 2025, 75% of organizations with a team platform will have a self-service portal created for their engineers.
To better understand why and how developer portals came to the portal, let’s look into the past.
Going beyond catalogs
Beyond the Grid Internal developer portals are important tools for the platform development team, but they emerged before the two concepts were fully developed. In fact, it was DevOps: engineers suddenly found themselves working harder on implementing and running the code they wrote. However, in reality and production, it is often not clear who owns the microservice.
The company realizes it has a problem: keeping track of and accessing all the microservices in the system. their ecosystem. They know they can fix this problem with something like a service manual.
However, these publications are not enough to solve this problem. Anish Dhar, founder and CEO of Cortex, encountered this problem while working at Uber, and the team spent a lot of time tracking the 200-300 services they used in Excel, trying to figure out who the owner was. While ensuring the service complies with security and operational excellence. ”
Many companies in the space are quickly solving this problem.
In early 2022, Cortex rival OpsLevel also raised $15 million to help companies deploy and monitor their microservices through a centralized developer portal.
Peer player Effx was acquired by Figma in 2021 after previously raising seed funding, giving developer portals a better understanding of microservices architectures.-
Cortex and Top-level are now business-focused. Similarly, Atlassian’s Compass seems to suit the needs of large enterprises.
Things were going well until an internal project at Spotify changed the game: Backstage.
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Doorway to chaos
Backstage is not internal portal development per se, but “an open platform for creating portals.”
Thus came a voluntary mandate for companies. Infrastructure that allows them to create developer portals that provide all tools, applications, data, services, APIs and information in a single interface. From Backstage, users can monitor Kubernetes, for example, review CI/CD status, view cloud costs, or track security incidents.
The platform started as a project at Spotify in 2016, but after the Swedish company launched in 2020, it is now used well beyond initial expectations.
According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Backstage is currently the development and platform used for 100 companies listed by American Airlines, Expedia Group, HelloFresh, Netflix, Peloton, Roku, Splunk, Wayfair and Zalando Waits. adopt it. CNCF’s website says it still has a thriving open community of more than 500 developer portals who submit PR, add new features, and create plugins.
Spotify’s decision to open the Backstage site is a way that can increase the power and financial resources of the project. The company learned its lessons in container orchestration and eventually replaced its own Helios project with the better Kubernetes.
It doesn’t seem to be going the way of the Dodo, with Backstage now accepted by major organizations and evolving as an open source project. But they have rivals.
Prior to launching Port, co-founders Zohar Einy and Yonatan Boguslavski developed in-house solutions for the Israel Defense Forces’ wide-ranging solutions. scale design portal. After the service was completed, they decided to create a similar product for general use using some of the lessons they learned from the first version.
–When we thought about Station and reinvented it as a multi-cloud solution, we kept in mind some things that set us apart from Backstage and other solutions. “Einy said.
This difference is based on two principles: simplicity and flexibility. With a no-code approach based on building blocks, Port looks “for the web developer portals, but for DevOps and platform,” he said Yes. – [To the platform team] it suits their organization We give them a very simple tool that they can use to build the building they need. –
To follow the comparison of buildings, the Port is based on the information on a Concept map, – Plans are the common buildings located in the Port. Microservices, environments, packages, clusters, libraries, etc. Represents entities that can be managed on the Node, such as
No port or Backstage can be defined as a service. While this is part of the functionality of these products, it also demonstrates the general principles that allow companies to create personalized services that developer portals can.
Roadie is the first company to offer a SaaS version of Backstage; The product offering is divided into two parts: catalog and scaffolding. In terms of Backstage, the latter allows developer portals to build applications, request infrastructure, and receive internal actions from models. “Scaffolding adds more value than catalogs,” Jorge Lain fiesta, Roadie’s social media director, told TechCrunch+.
Choosing a Portal
Now that you understand what a portal developer is, you need to know if your organization needs one.
Building an in-house solution like Spotify is not an option if you need it. – We saw very little in the beginning, but in today’s market, no one talks about creating solutions at home by learning; “Everyone knows they have to buy or build Backstage,” Einy said.
Actually, the size of the company plays a major role in this decision. Which solution is more fixable depends on whose developer portals it is. We asked, but everyone we spoke to backstage’ Agreed that it is very difficult to measure and manage.
While the simplicity and free model may be attractive to some companies looking to get started quickly, Backstage enjoys great reputation for being open source, meaning there is no risk of vendor lock-in.
At Roadie, we focus on hosting extensions with the Backstage release, along with support and community. Thanks to automatic updates, Roadie is also in the flow of key download requests from platform engineers and new features from great open source projects.
Gartner, portals no matter what companies choose He warns that they need to know that there is no solution: For these portals to be functional and effective, they must be configured and integrated with existing tools and systems.
But when configured correctly, the Developer Portal Backstage delivers on its promise: enabling team products to be delivered quickly without sacrificing freedom.
This would explain why the group is enjoying the tailwind that will soon come from the widespread use of intelligence in engineering workflows.
