The Backbone of Spotify Backstage: Service Catalogs
Backstage was initially designed as a tool for use within Spotify, but it has now been donated to the CNCF to serve as an open platform for the development of developer portals. It is presently being maintained by a worldwide community of contributors who genuinely enjoy contributing to the open source community. This community includes developers from all over the world.
Earlier, organizations deployed a large number of tools and services for monitoring, threat detection, and a great deal of other purposes. This made it difficult to determine who the owner of each tool and service was in the absence of adequate documentation. Moreover, there was also the chance that some of the services were being duplicated, which would result in an unnecessary increase in the use of resources. As a result, they require a single location to handle the maintenance of everything.
It is simple for an organization to create a centralized location for its engineering team by utilizing the Backstage developer portal. This can include tools, documentations, and other resources such that it will have everything from CI/CD status to Kubernetes monitoring, in addition to the API and library docs. The upkeep of these docs is quite essential given that they provide information regarding configuration code snippets that may be utilized by the developer to comprehend everything and anything. In a nutshell, it will provide your developers with all that they require in addition to their IDE and repository.
Service Catalogs: The Backbone of Spotify Backstage
Initially, an organization might only have one or two tools with which they manage the entire business. However, as the organization grows, new tools will be added as they are requested by various development, testing, or cloud teams and needed for an ever-expanding base of services.
However, more tools means less transparency. Moreover, having a thorough understanding of what services are operating on which infrastructure, who maintains it or who owns it, gets increasingly difficult. As a result, mapping and identifying the identical services that might already be functioning will be a more challenging endeavor. As a result, they require a solution that is capable of managing all of these aspects on behalf of the companies.
Determining each service in a centralized manner with their stakeholders, who basically implements and consumes those services, is what the service catalog is all about. Therefore, this service catalog maintains a record of ownership and the metadata associated with all of the software that is utilized within an organization. The service catalog functions as a digital registry, which means that an organization that makes extensive use of a wide variety of tools and services may quickly locate, invoke, and carry out services regardless of where they are physically located within the business.
Backstage provides teams with a very simple method for combining all of the organization's infrastructure tooling, services, and template, in addition to the documentation, all inside a one location. Designed with the idea of metadata YAML files as its foundation, Backstage makes it simple for a single team to manage tens of services and enables an organization to effortlessly manage thousands of those services. Because Backstage is capable of self-organization and doesn't even call for regular monitoring, it saves time.
How Do Service Catalogs in Backstage Work?
As mentioned earlier, the Backstage service catalog is quite simple to design and keep updated. It was developed around the idea of metadata YAML files that are basically saved together with the code, which Backstage utilizes after they are uploaded to it. Thus, it is even easy to establish a catalog within it. This is due to the fact that it was built around the concept of metadata YAML files. Since it is common knowledge that all of the services and other software components are typically listed in the YAML and the metadata files, these files contain all the relevant information.
When it comes to searching for components, Backstage basically displays by default the software components owned by the currently signed-in user’s team. However, users also have the ability to search all of the services that are being utilized by an organization by simply performing a search using the organization's name as the search criteria. You can get everything from templates for deploying services to adequate documentation in one place.
Conclusion
In order to successfully carry out their continued expansion, any growing company will need to deploy more services and software, as well as dependencies. However, it can get difficult to manage the ownership, documentation, and template details of each service and software that is required. The service catalog in Backstage helps companies organize everything in the right way in order to correctly assign ownership to the resources that are being deployed. The fact that this operates on a standard YAML format makes it much simpler for the organization to work with.