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This is great, and I think if it was fully adopted initially in greenfield, this would be a completely feasible solution. My question is though, these problems

This is great, and I think if it was fully adopted initially in greenfield, this would be a completely feasible solution. My question is though, these problems exist at large organizations and will be seen as "another tool to rule them all" synonymous with things like "sharepoint". Disclaimer: I'm not saying that backstage is anyway comparable to sharepoint except that it presents itself as this grandiose solution to all things on boarding and learning on your own. With that said, what's the low hanging fruit to entice adoption of backstage into an organization that already has a "process" like mentioned in the article of whiteboard meetings with stakeholders. Obviously that's not a great use of time, but it's also no extra learning or work, that SME can talk about their function without any preparation and can interactively answer any questions the learner asks at the time. That doesn't scale in practice, but it also doesn't require any more whole team buy in

royjacobs 4y ago
You are right, this is not going to be trivial and you definitely need buy-in on a management level. Backstage is pretty malleable but the only way to get it to work in an organisation if there is only a single source of truth for things like your software catalog. If there is a lot of legacy in your org, or if there is not enough buy-in then it will definitely be "yet another" system. There's a lot of functionality to unlock once you have a bunch of data in Backstage, though, so that could help tip the scale. The cloud costs dashboard that helps to show how much every service costs is a good demo :) One benefit to Backstage's approach is that you don't necessarily need to change your processes and tooling to work with Backstage. It can help, but it's not a strict requirement. Other tooling in the space requires you to buy in to their specific workflows and so on whereas Backstage is a bit more agnostic.

royjacobs 4y ago

You are right, this is not going to be trivial and you definitely need buy-in on a management level. Backstage is pretty malleable but the only way to get it to work in an organisation if there is only a single source of truth for things like your software catalog. If there is a lot of legacy in your org, or if there is not enough buy-in then it will definitely be "yet another" system. There's a lot of functionality to unlock once you have a bunch of data in Backstage, though, so that could help tip the scale. The cloud costs dashboard that helps to show how much every service costs is a good demo :) One benefit to Backstage's approach is that you don't necessarily need to change your processes and tooling to work with Backstage. It can help, but it's not a strict requirement. Other tooling in the space requires you to buy in to their specific workflows and so on whereas Backstage is a bit more agnostic.