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Has anyone successfully implemented Backstage at their company? How'd it go? We're looking at it for an internal platform serving ~50 engineers today, spanning

Has anyone successfully implemented Backstage at their company? How'd it go? We're looking at it for an internal platform serving ~50 engineers today, spanning mobile, backend, enterprise integrations, and ML teams. The hope is it'll make it easier to spin up new things "the right way" without e.g. ML PhDs having to learn Helm and K8s, plus other goodies like nice docs.

badgersnake 2y ago
We use it, and apparently it’s great. It didn’t help with the silos though because I don’t have access.
dilyevsky 2y ago
Ive watched a couple of botched attempts at implementing it and just like with other spotify fads you need to be all in or not at all. Also im highly sceptical it is actually going to “break your silos” or whatever they are promising because silos usually come from the management and the culture not the type of idp management happened to cargo cult on you
ravivyas 2y ago
It depends how you define successful. I work in a large org, and it work well for governance, and as a console, but it has its limitation. Pushing too many plugins on it makes management of the console hard
whirlwin 2y ago
We're 30-40 developers, and we have just stopped using backstage. We started using it for APIM behind Okta SSO, but all the custom frontend and functionality tweaking needed to make it look nice was daunting. If we start looking at it again, I'd try a simpler use-case, but definitely interested in trying it again.
stackskipton 2y ago
We piloted two jobs ago and aborted. Wouldn't recommend at your size because it seemed to do effectively, you need a "Backstage Team" which is not Ops Team who occasionally does Backstage work. Probably why Spotify is considering it because sweet consulting money. While I don't know your exact situation, I'm currently at company of your size engineers and stop torturing your Developers with Helm is off the shelf advice I would give. See if Kustomize would get the job done and be honest. I've found Devs can handle Kustomize a ton easier since kubectl kustomize > testoutput.yaml is alot easier for them to parse. Helm is great if you have a bunch of different things to launch with a ton of different options but most companies don't do that. They need HPA/Deployment/Service/Ingress which is easily handled by Kustomize.
- claytonjy 2y ago
  I'm somewhat new to helm, after a year I feel like I'm pretty good at it, but struggle to teach other ML folks what I've learned the hard way over the last year. Some of that is helm, plenty of it is Kubernetes. Most of our charts are ingress, service, deployment, service account, scaled object (keda), but there's plenty of small variation even across ML applications, plus the different needs of other teams. Any good resources you can point me to on how Kustomize might be easier for us?
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    Documentation is best: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/ https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/ However, biggest is it's just YAML patching. So you don't have this {{if such}} littered throughout your project that people can't easily pick up. Values is biggest reason I see people want Helm but if it's all env variables, kustomize lets you put in .env file it turns into config map and injects into deployments. It's possible Kustomize doesn't fix your problem esp if Developers have decided it's not their problem. I just find Devs find Kustomize much easier.
  - frompdx 2y ago
    Helm is what you should use as your cluster "package manager" to install all of your favorite off the shelf tools. Kustomize is probably a better choice for shipping your internal projects due to the variations you mentioned, but also because the learning curve isn't much steeper than learning about how to work with plain Kubernetes manifests.
arccy 2y ago
we use it through roadie.so but it doesn't feel very polished compared to other developer portals...
arnvald 2y ago
I’ve introduced it at a company with ~3,000 engineers and it’s been quite successful, though we do not yet leverage all of its power and we do have a dedicated team to run it and build on top of it We have a lot of in-house tooling and Backstage allows us to move big chunk of UIs into one place - it helps us keep UIs consistent, and makes it easier for everyone to find the tools we have. However with a lot of older, more mature in-house tooling it’s been a struggle to migrate to their data model, introduce their software templates etc. For an org with ~50 engineers I’d recommend something more off-the-shelf like Cortex, Port, or OpsLevel
junto 2y ago
We are trialing it. Setting up VPN connections, firewall rules, automated secret rotation, API key creation for centralized external services, DNS entries for private endpoints, new team onboarding, new developer onboarding, anything time consuming repeatable task that usually takes our ops or sec teams used to deliver manually in support of the various tech teams to deliver their apps into our clusters. The various “plugins” create PR’s for the ops/sec team to double check and approve to keep the auditors happy. Servicing ~500 developers. It’s definitely a platform that needs a dedicated team though.
frompdx 2y ago
My company uses it. Our team is about the same size. I have mixed feelings. It has been useful for things like making sure a new repository is created with all of the CI goodies every project should have. You can also use it to automate things like opening PRs against your gitops repo to get apps deployed from a template. Creating software templates can be a large investment. It would be great if there was a software template marketplace. The backstage contributors took a stab at this by creating a template repo that has not been updated in about a year. https://github.com/backstage/software-templates https://github.com/backstage/software-templates If you do invest in creating a template, be sure to get plenty of stakeholder feedback so the thing you make is something that actually gets used.
moltar 2y ago
Look into projen. It’s not as heavy and doesn’t require any services. But makes it easy to template and spin up projects. But the key is that templates are living and updatable. If you want an intro and a free consultation reach out via email in my profile.

badgersnake 2y ago

We use it, and apparently it’s great. It didn’t help with the silos though because I don’t have access.

dilyevsky 2y ago

Ive watched a couple of botched attempts at implementing it and just like with other spotify fads you need to be all in or not at all. Also im highly sceptical it is actually going to “break your silos” or whatever they are promising because silos usually come from the management and the culture not the type of idp management happened to cargo cult on you

ravivyas 2y ago

It depends how you define successful. I work in a large org, and it work well for governance, and as a console, but it has its limitation. Pushing too many plugins on it makes management of the console hard

whirlwin 2y ago

We're 30-40 developers, and we have just stopped using backstage. We started using it for APIM behind Okta SSO, but all the custom frontend and functionality tweaking needed to make it look nice was daunting. If we start looking at it again, I'd try a simpler use-case, but definitely interested in trying it again.

stackskipton 2y ago

We piloted two jobs ago and aborted. Wouldn't recommend at your size because it seemed to do effectively, you need a "Backstage Team" which is not Ops Team who occasionally does Backstage work. Probably why Spotify is considering it because sweet consulting money. While I don't know your exact situation, I'm currently at company of your size engineers and stop torturing your Developers with Helm is off the shelf advice I would give. See if Kustomize would get the job done and be honest. I've found Devs can handle Kustomize a ton easier since kubectl kustomize > testoutput.yaml is alot easier for them to parse. Helm is great if you have a bunch of different things to launch with a ton of different options but most companies don't do that. They need HPA/Deployment/Service/Ingress which is easily handled by Kustomize.

claytonjy 2y ago
I'm somewhat new to helm, after a year I feel like I'm pretty good at it, but struggle to teach other ML folks what I've learned the hard way over the last year. Some of that is helm, plenty of it is Kubernetes. Most of our charts are ingress, service, deployment, service account, scaled object (keda), but there's plenty of small variation even across ML applications, plus the different needs of other teams. Any good resources you can point me to on how Kustomize might be easier for us?
- stackskipton 2y ago
  Documentation is best: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/ https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/ However, biggest is it's just YAML patching. So you don't have this {{if such}} littered throughout your project that people can't easily pick up. Values is biggest reason I see people want Helm but if it's all env variables, kustomize lets you put in .env file it turns into config map and injects into deployments. It's possible Kustomize doesn't fix your problem esp if Developers have decided it's not their problem. I just find Devs find Kustomize much easier.
- frompdx 2y ago
  Helm is what you should use as your cluster "package manager" to install all of your favorite off the shelf tools. Kustomize is probably a better choice for shipping your internal projects due to the variations you mentioned, but also because the learning curve isn't much steeper than learning about how to work with plain Kubernetes manifests.

arccy 2y ago

we use it through roadie.so but it doesn't feel very polished compared to other developer portals...

arnvald 2y ago

I’ve introduced it at a company with ~3,000 engineers and it’s been quite successful, though we do not yet leverage all of its power and we do have a dedicated team to run it and build on top of it We have a lot of in-house tooling and Backstage allows us to move big chunk of UIs into one place - it helps us keep UIs consistent, and makes it easier for everyone to find the tools we have. However with a lot of older, more mature in-house tooling it’s been a struggle to migrate to their data model, introduce their software templates etc. For an org with ~50 engineers I’d recommend something more off-the-shelf like Cortex, Port, or OpsLevel

junto 2y ago

We are trialing it. Setting up VPN connections, firewall rules, automated secret rotation, API key creation for centralized external services, DNS entries for private endpoints, new team onboarding, new developer onboarding, anything time consuming repeatable task that usually takes our ops or sec teams used to deliver manually in support of the various tech teams to deliver their apps into our clusters. The various “plugins” create PR’s for the ops/sec team to double check and approve to keep the auditors happy. Servicing ~500 developers. It’s definitely a platform that needs a dedicated team though.

frompdx 2y ago

My company uses it. Our team is about the same size. I have mixed feelings. It has been useful for things like making sure a new repository is created with all of the CI goodies every project should have. You can also use it to automate things like opening PRs against your gitops repo to get apps deployed from a template. Creating software templates can be a large investment. It would be great if there was a software template marketplace. The backstage contributors took a stab at this by creating a template repo that has not been updated in about a year. https://github.com/backstage/software-templates https://github.com/backstage/software-templates If you do invest in creating a template, be sure to get plenty of stakeholder feedback so the thing you make is something that actually gets used.

moltar 2y ago

Look into projen. It’s not as heavy and doesn’t require any services. But makes it easy to template and spin up projects. But the key is that templates are living and updatable. If you want an intro and a free consultation reach out via email in my profile.