Top takeaways from companies building internal developer portals with Backstage

[arunima.kumar]

On October 4, 2023, Autodesk hosted a Developer Productivity Summit bringing together leaders – Twilio, Adobe, Zalando, Red Hat, American Airlines, Amazon Web Services, and Spotify – to dive into the value of internal developer portals to address productivity and experience challenges. It’s a bit like a group of jedis getting together for one full day - catching up with each other and sharing their wisdom.

This one day event brought together a vibrant community of companies that shared their journeys in adopting the open source technology Backstage – both the wins and lessons learned. Backstage was created at Spotify and donated to CNCF.

There were a lot of “aha” moments and what still resonates are the following…

• the community faces common challenges in developer productivity and experience. No company is alone, and we can learn together and align on best practices for internal developer portals.
• the important role that the Backstage community plays in answering questions and providing guidance
• leveraging templates to jump start your own community’s adoption and lower cognitive burden
• the role of design in creating a delightful and intuitive customer experience

Highlights from the presentations

Watch the summit recordings on YouTube

• Zalando showed a comprehensive Backstage implementation that included integration of observability, CI/CD, documentation, new service creation, ML and Data pipelines. 
• Twilio went deep into the taxonomy and systems model challenge and how they were using Backstage and the software catalog to reclassify and organize all their software using the Software Catalog. 
• American Airlines demonstrated the path to growth for Backstage was inner source and having their development teams build plugins to surface the information and workflows they wanted in Backstage. 
• RedHat shared a new commercial project they have built using Backstage called Janus. They are working on implementing dynamic plugin loading and UI customization. 
• Adobe shared their journey of consolidating multiple internal developer properties into one developer portal using Backstage.  
• AWS and Autodesk presented the Cloud Native Operational Excellence (CNOE) project launched recently together with Salesforce, Adobe, and Twilio to build Internal Developer Platforms using CNCF technologies. 

We asked a few Autodesk participants in the room about their top takeaways and here’s what we learned…

Platform approach

Across the presentations, we saw companies taking a platform engineering approach to solve productivity and experience challenges at scale.

“Standardization and golden paths” stood out critical for automation, notes Corey Caverly, software architect.

“It’s not just about developer portals but how these companies are navigating the challenges shared by all platform teams - trust, standards, onboarding, adoption and many more “shared platform sufferings”, says by Tulika Garg, director of product management, who was also the co-host of the day. “It’s amazing to see the impact these organizations have had on their trust outcomes and developer productivity by leaning in on a platform approach.”

Plugins

There was passionate discussion on plugins and the different ways to make it easier for teams to adopt and contribute to their own developer portals and back to the open source community.

“Either use a plugin from the community or build it”, notes Nafisa Chowdhury, software development manager working on the Autodesk internal developer portal. “Our team also needs to create a couple of initial templates to jumpstart developers at day zero with security, observability, and CI/CD pipelines built in. And we can enable teams to publish templates to the developer portal so that their developers are ready to go on day zero.”

Scott Morrison, distinguished architect, agrees with Nafisa’s insights on plugins and templates. He said, “We need teams across Autodesk to contribute. Just about all speakers called out inner sourcing as a key part of their implementation. We need contribution guidelines and a governance procedure. That’s the only way to support the wide range of use cases across the Autodesk developer community”.

We saw some creative use cases for plugins. Spotify showcased that they are using “mentor and pair” for mentors and mentees to discover each other within the organization instead of the company assigning matches. “No more awkward mentorships,” reacts Amy Hoellwarth, content designer.

Developer experience

Several speakers elevated experience design as crucial to removing toil for developers. The American Airlines presentation has an insightful deep dive into how they created user personas to shape developer experiences.

Erika Harrison, senior software engineer, notes, “There was an interesting observation that teams take stronger ownership for CI/CD and development operations when these processes are easier to work with.” That’s the ultimate benefit – teams engaged and excited to build better products.

Michelangelo Capraro, experience design architect, emphasizes, “Investing in the design of internal developer portals is important. From designing the taxonomy to designing the sidebar icons and information architecture, design can really help accelerate by elevating the experience.”

Software catalog

For many companies, the biggest need with which they start an internal developer portal journey is for a comprehensive and accurate record of their software metadata (services, websites, libraries, data pipelines, etc.) If that’s your challenge too, do watch Twilio’s presentation focused on how they use Backstage to organize their software metadata.

Information architect, Angie Peng, notes that automation of metadata management is a key theme. “It cuts down on the time developers spend to make changes but requires a good source for the metadata. By monitoring catalog health, teams know how and when to prioritize. This also contributes to complete metadata by displaying how many entities lack any fields.”

Amy Hoellwarth, senior content designer, noted “We can validate through GitOps. Currently, we try to validate metadata manually and the onus is on the user to ensure they enter the metadata correctly. If we can automate, that would be a huge help in our endeavors.”

Sara Messing, manager of UI/UX engineering, had a similar note about GitOps. “One of my main takeaways was the importance of GitOps. Companies are using this in creative ways, for validation, for example. We should leverage this along with other workflows to ease developer toil and pain.”

Wrapping up

It was awesome to learn from the Backstage community – both the presenters and the technologists who attended. There are two things that stood out about this community.

Rex Lam, machine learning director, calls out “I learned that Backstage is backed by a large, vibrant, and dynamic community with a diverse blend of open-source enthusiasts and commercial contributors. This alone instills a strong sense of confidence in me towards adopting Backstage.”

How do you grow your own community at your company? Sara Mesing captures it. “Collaboration is key to success. For us at Autodesk, this can mean easing the pain of onboarding by closer collaboration development teams, collaborating on plugin development from across the company, and making collaboration on inner source critical.”

Aliza Carpio and Arunima Kumar co-authored the blog. Thanks to all the summit participants who contributed their input!