Platform Engineering Backstage

Platform Engineering

With the economy in jeopardy, more pressure than ever is on companies to build and deploy software more efficiently. The dictum “You build it, you own it”, courtesy of the Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogel in 2006 has been outdated by the increasingly complexity of today’s highly distributed software systems. Pure “shifting left” will lead to a mediocre outcome, with everyone does everything. The consequences are far-reaching, leading to everything from “ShadowOps to large-scale burnout of developers.

But what is platform engineering? Luca Galante, product lead at Humanitec, wrote in a blog post on the Platform Engineering website, that it’s

the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud native era

As platform engineers, we want to provide an integrated platform, covering everything from the skeleton setup of a project or service, the operational necessities up to the continious deployment of an application. Entering the world of an “Internal Developer Platform”, IT-OPS choose “Backstage, a tool developed by Spotify to do a POC. Backstage can provide a central catalog of all services and tools, having all documentation and contact persons at one place, with easy-to-integrate automations for developer self service.

Our POC quickly evolved into something useful at the prodcution level. Kudos to our intern, Clemens Heithecker, who created the first skeleton for our microservices with great support from Haydn Evans and contributions from the teams at Neuland and Netconomy.

Find our Backstage instance at https://backstage.douglas.group/