Backstage: Solving Developer Experience Painpoints
Key Points
- Developers often struggle with “developer experience” issues like scattered resources and repetitive requests, which led Spotify to create the open‑source Backstage platform and donate it to the CNCF.
- Backstage’s **catalog** aggregates all of a company’s services, repositories, Kubernetes projects, and other assets into a single searchable view, eliminating the “bookmark of death” problem.
- Integrated **plug‑ins** enrich catalog entries with live data such as Argo CD/Tekton runs, Jira tickets, pull‑request status, and other tooling, giving developers instant context on each resource.
- The platform’s **software templates** automate the creation of new resources (e.g., repos, namespaces, VMs) via form‑driven workflows, removing the “ticket purgatory” of manual request processes.
- Each newly‑provisioned resource is automatically added to the catalog, keeping documentation up‑to‑date and ensuring developers always have a single source of truth for the ecosystem.
Sections
- Backstage Improves Developer Experience - The speaker explains how Spotify’s open‑source Backstage platform centralizes tooling and catalogs to alleviate common developer frustrations such as scattered bookmarks.
- Backstage Solves Documentation Graveyard - Backstage eliminates isolated, outdated docs by storing markdown alongside code, linking them to the service catalog, and providing unified rendering and searchable access.
- YouTube Call‑to‑Action Reminder - The speaker urges viewers to like the video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on notifications for future uploads.
Full Transcript
# Backstage: Solving Developer Experience Painpoints **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1IrNe5MmZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1IrNe5MmZg) **Duration:** 00:06:18 ## Summary - Developers often struggle with “developer experience” issues like scattered resources and repetitive requests, which led Spotify to create the open‑source Backstage platform and donate it to the CNCF. - Backstage’s **catalog** aggregates all of a company’s services, repositories, Kubernetes projects, and other assets into a single searchable view, eliminating the “bookmark of death” problem. - Integrated **plug‑ins** enrich catalog entries with live data such as Argo CD/Tekton runs, Jira tickets, pull‑request status, and other tooling, giving developers instant context on each resource. - The platform’s **software templates** automate the creation of new resources (e.g., repos, namespaces, VMs) via form‑driven workflows, removing the “ticket purgatory” of manual request processes. - Each newly‑provisioned resource is automatically added to the catalog, keeping documentation up‑to‑date and ensuring developers always have a single source of truth for the ecosystem. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1IrNe5MmZg&t=0s) **Backstage Improves Developer Experience** - The speaker explains how Spotify’s open‑source Backstage platform centralizes tooling and catalogs to alleviate common developer frustrations such as scattered bookmarks. - [00:03:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1IrNe5MmZg&t=185s) **Backstage Solves Documentation Graveyard** - Backstage eliminates isolated, outdated docs by storing markdown alongside code, linking them to the service catalog, and providing unified rendering and searchable access. - [00:06:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1IrNe5MmZg&t=370s) **YouTube Call‑to‑Action Reminder** - The speaker urges viewers to like the video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on notifications for future uploads. ## Full Transcript
We often talk about the user experience,
but frequently we don't talk about the people that build
the user experience: The developer experience.
Developers have a lot of frustrations,
a lot of things that aren't writing code that they are dealing with.
And Spotify saw this themselves and they decided to do something about it.
So they created an open source project donated to the CNCF called Backstage.
Backstage attempts to address all of these, but doing it slightly differently
by always making sure that the developer is in focus.
So let's look at some of these pains and how Backstage can help solve them.
First off is
“bookmark of death”.
What do I mean by that?
Well, as a developer, I've felt this myself in the past,
and I feel like a lot of you watching this have--
you have a neverending list of bookmarks that if you lost, you
probably wouldn't know where to go or how to find anything.
And why do you have these?
Because there's no central place to find
all of your websites, your applications.
And Backstage solves this with the catalog.
But the way it does it, a little differently--instead of another
thing to maintain, it simply leverages the repositories you already have,
let it be repository, storing your Kubernetes projects,
or automation playbooks, or virtual machine applications.
You've already taken the time to organize them and structure them,
so Backstage leverages them to create this catalog.
So everything is now in one place.
To top that off with plug-ins, now
you can bring the technologies that those use into the catalog.
So now when you look at an item such as your Kubernetes service,
we can see the ArgosCD run or Tekton run.
We can also see any Jira tickets, or any other project management tickets
that you're using.
We might also be able to see, say, pull requests
that are waiting to be reviewed and really anything else.
Now, the next thing that gets frustrating is “ticket purgatory”.
You've probably been there.
You need a new repository.
You need a new service or namespace in your cluster, a new VM spun up...
something.
And you wind up searching forever, trying just to figure out who do I even ask?
Then when you do, you file the ticket
and hope that one day gets answered. And you're left in purgatory.
Well, Backstage solves this with what's called "software templates".
And software templates enable your organization
to create best practices and automate them.
So instead of you filing a ticket and then talking to somebody else
and hoping for the best, you simply fill out a form and software templates
kicks off any of the automations necessary to build these things.
let it be your Kubernetes namespace, new automation playbook,
an entire Git repository, or a virtual machine.
And then it also makes sure to add that into the catalog.
So now that new resource that you've spun up is expanding in the catalog for you.
So we've got a catalog with all of our stuff.
We can make new things.
Now we have to explain what they are.
And this is
where the “documentation graveyard” comes in.
Write a document and you put it in a file, put it in a folder.
Maybe you put it in the master document management system your company has,
and it's gone forever.
You can't find it. No one else can find it.
Even if they wanted to, they probably will never look at it again.
It's not updated and it confuses everyone.
You hire someone new and they don't even know where to get started.
So Backstage addresses this
by simplifying the documentation problem.
By one, eliminating proprietary, strange
WYSIWYG documents and just connecting them to the catalog
and making the markdown files that live in your repository.
So now whenever you want to update your documentation for, say,
my service running Kubernetes, well, I just do a pull request.
And that means that when I'm updating code,
I can probably update the document along the way.
Backstage takes care of rendering all of it together in one place.
I just put it in the repository like I do everything else.
Now we've
got a catalog, we've got the documents, we got the templates.
That's a lot of stuff.
So how do we make this any better?
Well, we tie it all together by preventing you from being “lost at sea”.
By that, I mean finding your way
with Backstage's search.
It indexes the catalog, the documentations, software
templates and plug-ins.
And from there, you're able to search to find anything.
So maybe you want to know if we have a Kafka service that runs already,
or if you want to know who owns that website and everything in between.
Because the search is building off the material that you as the developer
are helping add through the repository you're already managing,
that means you can find it and it's always up-to-date.
So Backstage is able to address that problem with the “bookmarks
and death” by giving you a catalog to pull all of your stuff from your repository
and make it easy to find.
It gives you a way to
create those new resources through software templates.
It gives you a way to keep up with documents
so they don't go to the graveyard.
And it prevents everyone from being lost
by indexing all of it and making it easy to find.
If you want to learn more about Backstage and how it can benefit your organization
or how to contribute to itself, go to backstage.io.
From there you'll find tutorials and examples of how to deploy Backstage
and how to make best practices for your organization.
And if you want a fully supported, scaled enterprise-capable
and secured and compliant version, Red Hat Developer Hub might be for you.
This is Red Hat's enterprise-hardened
instance of Backstage with our own hardened plug-ins.
To learn more about that, go to developers.redhat.com/rhdh.
Thanks for watching.
And don't forget to smash that like button, hit subscribe and turn
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