[HN Gopher] I spent two years trying to do what Backstage does f... ___________________________________________________________________ I spent two years trying to do what Backstage does for free Author : danwee Score : 212 points Date : 2022-09-20 09:01 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (stackoverflow.blog) (TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.blog) | bdwalter wrote: | (Shameless plug) Cofounder of OpenContext.com here. We're a bit | different than a developer portal or services catalog, we're a | complete context graph of all the assets in your product | pipeline. Everything from products, documents, microservices, | codepaths, vulnerabilities, people, teams, etc and the | relationships between them. The complete context for DevSecOps. | Check us out. | iancmceachern wrote: | My parents owned anf ran a jewelry store for 35 years, nearly | their entire working life. My Dad was a master jeweler, | goldsmith, sculptor. Among many things, they would string and re- | string pearls for folks. Usually family heirlooms that they | wanted to keep, but also be able to wear and not fear they'd | break and fall all.over the floor. After years of doing that, and | also buying raw oearls from overseas, stranding them, and then | selling them, my Dad asked the supplier, do yoi guys do | stranding? Yes, yes they did, for free. He could have been | ordering pre-strung pearls for the same price the whole time. | Stranding pearls takes time. | bombcar wrote: | One of the questions I like to ask contractors before beginning | work is "what changes would make this cheaper/easier for you?" | Often simple things like moving a planned wall an inch or | switching the location of something can make it vastly easier; | or there will be things they can get preassembled or done for | free. | | And sometimes the factory building whatever has a giant machine | that can easily do what would take you quite a long time to do | by hand. | lkois wrote: | I used to work in a place that assembled machines based on | old designs that rarely got reviewed, since if it ain't broke | don't fix it. | | When working on one particular unit, I found that they would | order a bunch of plastic panels, cut to size, and some with | precut holes. And others with secondary drawings, instructing | us how to drill out a bunch of holes ourselves. Sometimes not | even all the holes, just a few, in addition to the precut. | | When I asked why we didn't just ask the supplier to cut out | ALL the holes, I basically got a shrug. | | So I merged the secondary drawings and sent them to the | supplier, and the assembly team never wasted time on that | nonsense again. | thehappypm wrote: | It's funny. They seem to be two kinds of contractors out | there. Type one will push as hard as possible for you to | design things in a way that makes it easier for them. To the | point where there are all sorts of design compromises like a | beam in the middle of your kitchen. The second type is the | one who wants to deliver exactly the vision of the client, to | the point where they are adding a huge amount of complexity | to perfectly meet unreasonable demands. | markdown wrote: | There's a Seinfeld episode about the latter. | ftlio wrote: | I worked at a custom millwork firm and had a knack for | value engineering projects. After making the switch to SWE, | where I assumed everyone knew how to do this, I've realized | that there only seems to be two kinds of SWEs as well, | exactly as you've described. It turns out that value | creation is hard. | | There are plenty of contractors who know how to deliver an | optimal solution and who make incredible money. | bombcar wrote: | This is usually where the general contractor or the | architect (if you don't have one, then that means _you_ are | that role) steps in to help insure the project is as it | should be. | halgir wrote: | In my experience, contractors will build exactly what I ask | for without challenging unimportant details that would have | made things easier. My interpretation is that because they | have so much internalized knowledge, they assume that I | obviously know many of the same things that they do, and | that I have already considered any such changes and | actively decided against them. I've since learned to do | what was suggested above. | | It's been a valuable lesson for myself to question just how | much of my internalized "obvious" knowledge about technical | matters is apparent to clients and partners. Never assume. | [deleted] | lazide wrote: | Also, they can charge more if it's harder (usually), as | long as it's obvious to other contractors it would be | hard too. | | If the low bidder gave that bid because they didn't | notice, then also lulz - tends to weed out the problem | children. Really painful for the customer and said | contractor though. | RHSeeger wrote: | As an example of the opposite of this... | | We had a pond put in a number of years back. The guys | that did the work laid out what they would be building, | showed us everything, and we agreed on it. While digging | out the earth for the pond, they ran into a boulder not | too far underground. They spend about half a day fighting | with the boulder, seeing if they could break it up, etc; | whatever they could do to get it out of the way. | | When we went out to chat with them and see how the work | was going, they told us about the rock and how it's being | difficult. We told them we'd be fine with them changing | the shape of the pond to just work around the boulder. | They were happy about this because it made their lives | much easier. | | The cost of the creation of the pond was set before they | started work on it. They gained nothing by trying really | hard to create what they said they would; other than the | fact that they did a good job and had happy clients. But | they spend the time trying to deal with the problem | without any real complaints (the talk about it being | difficult was a casual chat, not them coming to us to | complain). | ayewo wrote: | There's a quote along the lines of: | | "An amateur will build what you _want_ and an expert will | build what you _need_. " | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | Yeah, but the problem is that there are too many | customers who refuse to believe that they need what you | tell them and then blame you when you deliver what they | asked for. | lazyasciiart wrote: | Yes, the quote could be updated in a couple of ways. I | like "An amateur will try to build what you asked for, a | professional will deliver it, and a psychic would have | built what you want". | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | It's funny how that works. I have a small electronics/firmware | consulting side business. I used to make up wire harnesses for | a customer, buying the wire, cutting to length and stripping | insulation, crimping on connectors, etc. It was slow and my | quality wasn't the greatest. | | Then I looked around and found a company that would provide me | the correct length of wire cut to size with the right terminals | crimped in place _all for less than I could buy just the bulk | wire in the first place_ with no setup costs. Minimum order, | IIRC was 100 pieces, which is peanuts. | | Blew my mind! | | At least I only struggled for a month or two before realizing | that there had to be an easier way :-) | jakswa wrote: | It's hard to infer from some quick documentation-reading whether | kubernetes is required to enjoy a lot of the described benefits. | Feels like a big first step: "Adopt kubernetes." Having been at a | medium-sized org leaning into kubernetes, I can see the draw of a | system like this, especially for non-IC roles. | royjacobs wrote: | No, that's not needed. There's a K8S plugin for Backstage that | can link your deployments to the services in Backstage's | service catalog, which is useful. But that's pretty much the | only part of Backstage that would "require" Kubernetes. | azemetre wrote: | Isn't the only thing required for Backstage a GitHub account? | It's been a while but I remember GitLab not having the same | feature parity and OSS alternatives like Gitea being | completely left in the dust. Kinda disappointing if this is | still the case, that an OS tool requires corporate owned | software to use but I suppose life is full of jokes. | royjacobs wrote: | No, there's no requirement for any kind of source control | at all. If you do have source control in your company (and, | if so, welcome to the 1990s!) you can set it up in such a | way that all your repos get scanned for metadata that gets | ingested into the software catalog. There's implementations | for GitHub and Gitlab (I built that one at $PREV_JOB) and | others. Also, other kind of metadata, like user and group | information, can come from sources like LDAP, Azure AD, | etc. | | To be clear, Backstage is not an alternative to Gitea, | Github or anything like that. It's not a source code | repository hosting tool. | mdlnr wrote: | I also really dig the approach of Backstage but found maintaining | the installation a real pita. They even give you a tool that | tells you which lines have to be manually updated in your | installation when updating (https://backstage.github.io/upgrade- | helper/). | kenrose wrote: | Agreed. We've seen this with our customers at OpsLevel who lean | away from Backstage. Installing (and updating) Backstage is | painful. | | One of our team members who previously ran a Backstage instance | at $OldJob wrote about that pain: | | https://www.opslevel.com/blog/hands-on-backstage-learnings | prmoustache wrote: | The problem isn't really installing backstage but integrating | all the stuff around it. | | It is not a turnkey solution per se and what they call plugins | aren't plugins in the traditionnal sense where you would just | download a package and put it in a directory. It requires | editing the actual react code to set most of them. So | maintaining backstage involve maintaining a set of patches and | a pipeline to build a docker image. | grinnick wrote: | This is exactly why we created https://roadie.io I'm the | founder. | NonNefarious wrote: | Backstage is a well-known entertainment-industry site and | publication. What's the motivation for trying to duplicate it? | powersurge360 wrote: | I am becoming increasingly skeptical that good internal | documentation is even possible. I've been working in software | development for around 12 years and have _never_ seen it done | well and asking around the best I've heard offered up is the | equivalent of an internal stack overflow. | | For a while, I thought that maybe an exception would be having a | technical writer on staff but after reading this post I'm | significantly disheartened on that front too. I'd be interested | to hear if anyone on hacker news has experienced good internal | documentation and even more interested if any of you folks have | experienced anything truly _great_. | | For my contribution, I've found that documentation fails for a | couple of reasons. The first is the burden of correctness. The | people who most would like documentation are also the people who | most need the documentation and they usually are also the people | most likely to be reluctant to contribute to the documentation | because they don't feel they can accurately represent the | information. Imagine someone ramping into a feature and spending | a few days reverse engineering how it works, collecting info, | etc. Sometimes they'll put it up somewhere but a lot of the time | contributing partial information feels 'wrong'. | | And the second bit I find to be a big reason why documentation | efforts fail is just the sheer friction of putting it into the | documentation store to begin with. In confluence, for example, if | you have a bit of information it can be tough to work out how to | categorize it, where in the hierarchy it should go, etc, etc. Or | if it's a GitHub wiki you want to put it somewhere that it is | discoverable but also be careful that it's 'correct' because you | don't want to break backlinks if it gets recategorized. | | I've mostly given up on it at this point. Instead, I take | detailed personal notes and make them publicly available. It | doesn't have to be correct because being advertised as personal | notes means that it's my opinion on the truth rather than | objective fact. It isn't far away from my codebase, I can just | tap a short keybinding in my editor to type my notes or search | them and I can link directly from the notes to lines of code in | files to jump back and forth. The particular system I use means | that if I write a short snippet of code to solve a one off issue | (like calling a path helper to derive a URL that I can't find in | the interface) I can even drop it in a code block and execute it | right from my note-taking tool. It isn't ideal for sure but I've | gotten way farther in having a shareable knowledge base this way | than I have in literal years of trying to get a shared, useful | documentation store spun up. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | This is why IMO in any nontrivial organization you need a | dedicated technical writer - if only someone that sorts out the | wiki and keeps it clean. | P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: | The issue is that people seem to equate "good documentation" | with complete. | | It's just not possible to do this. I think it would be better | to talk about "effective documentation". | | My opinion on the matter: | | Three levels of documentation | | 1. high level documentation that describes the problems and the | goals from the business perspective | | 2. mid-level documentation that describes the architecture that | gets us there | | 3. low-level documentation, aka code. | | high level gives you direction (where), mid-level gives you | context (what), low-level gives you implementation (how) | | You need the what to understand the how, and you need the where | to understand the what. | | The other piece is an acceptance that you can't document away | the need for tacit knowledge. | | To draw an analogy. | | No amount of documentation is ever going to allow a kid to hop | on a bike and ride it perfectly the first time. That is not | what it means to teach a child to ride a bike. Instead the goal | is to have enough documentation to minimize the amount of time | it takes that child to gain the tacit knowledge necessary to | ride a bike acceptably. | | Once you accept the above and lower your bar, "effective | documentation" becomes much more achievable. | froh wrote: | yes. and the hard part is keeping the three levels in sync. | austinwade wrote: | I like this approach. What is this note-taking tool? I want to | use it. Also linking to code from the docs sounds really nice. | powersurge360 wrote: | It's org mode in emacs with the org-roam plugin. If I wasn't | using emacs I would probably have a folder full of markdown | files instead and leverage a project-based grep to search it. | The real power in the system is that it's close to your | editor and personal so you can iteratively build up your | knowledge. | | In particular, every GitHub wiki belonging to an organization | or a public project itself is a git repo of markdown files | that you can clone and commit to. I probably would use that | for per project documentation w/ a separate folder for | managing broader notes. I think it's important to separate | the markdown from a project's code because otherwise you can | have important markdown updates trapped in a branch that | hasn't been merged yet and because git works by line rather | than by word you can get into complicated merge conflicts by | features that touch similar business concepts. | | Org mode happens to add some niceties on top in that you can | have an example code block (roughly comparable to a triple | back-tick code block in markdown) that also can be executed. | The example code block can take some arguments like what | interpreter to use and will paste the output into another | code block underneath the source code block. | | Because org mode is also used for organizing tasks it is easy | to use it as a scratch pad as you grind through tasks and if | something turns out to be useful you can promote it to a top | level note (or org-roam node). And even if it's not obvious | that it's a note candidate, just thinking through problems | 'out loud' in org means you can search and find it later when | the same or an adjacent problem comes up. | | Another favorite feature I like in org mode is that in any | code at any time I can tap out 'SPC n l' and it will capture | a reference to the file and the line in the file and allow me | to link to it in my notes. It doesn't capture by line number | but by copying the literal line, which means that as feature | updates push the line number up and down, it still will be | able to find exactly the right file in exactly the right line | as long as the line's content hasn't changed. It also serves | as a rather nice canary because if the docs link to a line | that no longer exists, then the documentation has probably | gone stale. | | The last major win with org mode vs markdown is with org- | roam, which borrows the ideas from the standalone program | Roam Research (which also is very similar to notion). Every | 'node' you make initially is a file and you can fill it in as | a wiki type structure. Everything is flat on the filesystem | and has a unique id prepended to it so you can't overwrite it | with another node of the same name. There's also a UUID | associated with each node so if you move from one place to | another, none of the links need to be updated. Contrast that | with a regular wiki or markdown where when you move a file to | a new folder you either have to leave a redirect behind or go | through and update all of the back links. | | You can also start a node as a subheading and later on | promote it to a full file with all the backlinks still | working correctly. | | I started using org mode years ago with spacemacs, got | frustrated with spacemacs, and gave up until earlier this | year when I found doom emacs and gave it another spin. I wish | I had a better recommendation for an alternative but after | looking for 4-5 years for something as good as org mode, I | could never find anything. Notion seems like a popular | alternative but there's also a lot of shiny bells and | whistles in it that can cause 'productivity procrastination' | where you spend time configuring and turning knobs instead of | actually using the system. Ironically, the second best tool I | found was plain pen and paper using a minimal bullet journal | technique and taking special care to do indexing. Of course, | you can't share plain pen and paper in that way, but the name | of the game for personal use is low friction and ready | access. The better a system scores on those two in term of | note-taking the more useful it will be. | stavros wrote: | I don't know about the GP, but I wrote a simple script that | will make a mdBook site out of Joplin notes: | | https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/ | pydry wrote: | I've never seen it done properly either, but I think it's more | a matter of incentives than structure or tools. The places | where it was worst were places where people's reaction to wrong | documentation tended to be a shrug. | | Sometimes there were people who didn't document coz they kind | of liked being the font of all knowledge. | | Confluence also sucks - even harder than jira, if that's | possible. | BannedInSweden wrote: | The main problem with Backstage (BS) is that while it does | provide some canned functionality, any extension of that | functionality requires the utilization of their plugins system | and wholesale buy-in to their ecosystem. Welcome to Wordpress for | enterprise developers folks! | | The plugin system isn't bad - but its a false narrative to | believe you plunk this down and get some sort of valuable | developer portal at an enterprise level (small biz sure - fortune | 500...yeah no). | | Spotify does open-source a number of their plugins, but after | having looked extensively at which ones they make available and | which ones we would have to write (and deal with their plugin | system for) we opted out. The cost/benefit ratio is definitely | there for a technical writer, but IMO its not there for serious | development. (Pls - Anyone who disagrees with that - begin by | telling me why you don't use Joomla as a base for all your custom | applications ) | | Team integration at a company level is another challenge with | Backstage. GitHub (the basis and sort of harvested DB for BS) is | largely disconnected from company structures and AD and all the | things for most companies. Yes GitHub enterprise is a thing... no | in general its still not connected to company structures. There | are teams in Backstage, but they are generally managed in | isolation from the rest of the company which presents its own | challenges and integration problems with other systems. Don't | even get me started on the fact that asking everyone to put their | service defintions in specific files in specific places in GitHub | is no better/worse than making them enter it into a ui or | spreadsheet or confluence article or anything except now its | scattered in 10,000 repos - good luck getting everyone to change | that. | | Ultimately this isn't software that you simply install and use. | Its a base that will likely require extension, and doing so means | going down a one way path of adoption. Nothing it does is | compatible with anything else. Is that good for Spotify - sure. | Lots of folks helping build software they want to use is great. | Is it good for the community? I'm not so sure. This article felt | like a paid add (not suggesting it was - just saying it read like | one) more than an honest plus/minus of the software and is anyone | really surprised a technical writer couldn't build a proper | enterprise developer portal by themselves? In other news - water | is wet, the sky is blue and my kid wants to watch youtube. | Melatonic wrote: | So what do you recommend then instead? | BannedInSweden wrote: | How about just using github? or if you want more how about | building a a node/vue app? Or for docs scrounge up any static | doc creation system and thereyago. most have some really | editing features and BEHOLD markdown with colors! | | I'm being a little silly there but my issue isn't that this | isn't valuable software in the right situation. My issues is | that its presented as some sort of magic bullet for a | specific documentation issue when the problems described are | generally not software related or software solved. | | Most of what is presented in the article isn't about BS doing | what this person attempted to do for 2 years. Its about | switching paradigms and letting folks document in their repos | instead of in a centralized system. One could just as easily | look over the repos in a github org and go to those files in | a repo. Both solutions require standardizing where things are | document..... so does a centralized system. | | The big callout should be that when trying to centralize docs | that align to apps they become disconnected from the apps | themselves and thus its a pita to get everyone to do | everything in 2 places. I'd be very curious if they | completely turned off BS if there would be any loss... if not | why bother with the overhead. Templating and other things are | well handled by MS Clis, cookie-cutter or other more portable | concepts and who needs yet another team and resource mgmt | system. Kibana and other off the shelf systems can easily | provide more comprehensive and robust stats and generally | speaking there is a more enterprise level solution for just | about everything it does. | | Yes BS is a swiss army knife but when was the last time you | saw a chef use one of those in the kitchen? | qbasic_forever wrote: | The real gem highlighted by backstage is the MkDocs Material | theme: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ It's | seriously awesome and has a lot of nice customization options. | Out of the box it makes very clean and professional technical | docs from a pile of markdown files. Even if you don't need to go | the whole backstage route, seriously consider using mkdocs and | the material theme. | [deleted] | kenrose wrote: | > So when I had questions, I needed to track down who owned the | service, where their code lived, where their Jira ticket project | was, which Slack channel they lived in, and where in the wiki | their internal documentation was. Keeping track of this for 100+ | services was a pain, so I ended up creating a spreadsheet. It | turns out that everyone else in the org needed this information, | so this spreadsheet that I created for myself became the document | of record for services. | | 100%. | | Solving this problem is why I started OpsLevel [1] a few years | back. Everyone always starts with a spreadsheet because they're | flexible. | | But spreadsheets quickly fall apart because they're not complete | / up-to-date, automated, or really scalable. | | We figured we could automate a whole lot of collecting service | info from different places (Git, k8s, other deployment streams) | and keeping it up-to-date. | | [1] - https://www.opslevel.com | superdug wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | grinnick wrote: | My company - roadie.io - offers SaaS Backstage. We're the second | largest contributor after Spotify and we're co-hosting the first | ever BackstageCon at KubeCon NA this year. | | Get in touch if you ever want to discuss Backstage. Email in bio. | pforret wrote: | No pricing on your page? Are you "contact our sales team" | expensive? | grinnick wrote: | ? There is transparent pricing from 50 up to 150 developers: | roadie.io/pricing/ It's linked directly in the header. | | For deals bigger than 150 devs, we have found customers | prefer to talk to sales. | kitbrennan wrote: | FYI: the link to the pricing page doesn't appear in your | mobile menu | grinnick wrote: | Wow you're right. That's a bug. Thank you! | [deleted] | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | https://roadie.io/pricing/ | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | FWIW, it would be great if you had a breakdown of the TCO. The | price is at a point where many orgs would have some suit decide | "we have a DevOps guy, we'll just run Backstage ourselves and | save $27K/yr". I think it's worth the money but you need to | show the suits where that money is going, what kind of value | they're getting from having you run it, and consider the risks | (what if it gets compromised, goes down, etc). Also, I don't | see SSO mentioned; you really want to mention that, it's pretty | important for enterprise. | grinnick wrote: | Thanks for the feedback and fwiw I completely agree. We can | do much better in this area. We're a team of engineers so we | struggle with marketing and copy. | | SSO is supported on all plans by default. | corwinstephen wrote: | Unrelated to the discussion, just wanted to comment on | Backstage's tagline: | | "Build an ecosystem, not a wilderness" | | which is ironic because a wilderness is arguably the most | complete and perfectly functioning ecosystem you're gonna get. | lgrebe wrote: | i like that thought. What would be a more ideal pair then? | | Build a wilderness, not a parking lot | codingdave wrote: | "Build an ecosystem, not dystopian sprawl" | lazyasciiart wrote: | Create a garden, not a wilderness. OR (depending on your | audience) Build an ecosystem, not a garden. | georgeoliver wrote: | An ecosystem, not a Superfund site. | robbyking wrote: | Is there a term for this phenomenon, my dear Watson? | x3ro wrote: | Curious, I just started a project to integrate Backstage at a | Fortune 500, with > 10000 repositories. It does seem like a good | foundation so far. Their idea of what it's supposed to accomplish | internally is mostly the same as what this blogpost describes. | citruscomputing wrote: | Anything you've learned worth sharing? How has your experience | with Backstage been? Why did you choose it over other options? | I might be working on a similar project soon. | moralestapia wrote: | Are there other good options? | | Edit: Thanks everyone! | password4321 wrote: | Might find some near previous mentions: | | https://hn.algolia.com/?query=backstage.io%2F&sort=byDate&t | y... | tecleandor wrote: | We didn't have enough time for testing, but there's also | Clutch, coming from the Lyft team. (Checking right now I'm | not able to see a "releases" page with versions and that | stuff...) | | https://clutch.sh/ | jdwithit wrote: | First time seeing this, but reading the docs it looks | more like a modern take on Rundeck[0]. A way to give | developers one-click access to operational tasks. Rather | than a service catalog and developer portal like | Backstage. | | [0] https://www.rundeck.com/ | thisisbrians wrote: | We've just started using Atlassian Compass | (https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass) for our | software catalog, but it appears to be much less featured | than Backstage. We're taking a look at replacing it with | Backstage, and curious if anyone else has notes on the | comparison. | [deleted] | gsdatta wrote: | (Shameless plug) - founder of https://www.cortex.io (YC | W20) here! We build an off-the-shelf developer portal. | Backstage is great if you have lots of time/very niche | requirements, but most of our users need a system that | "just works" to drive ownership/best practices without | adding a ton of overhead | agmiklas wrote: | opslevel.com is worth checking out. | | (Disclosure -- I'm an investor.) | kenrose wrote: | Thanks Andrew. (Disclosure: I'm a founder/CTO). | | Backstage is super configurable, but requires that you | _build_ your own developer portal. That generally | requires a dedicated team of people at your company to | think about dev workflows to support, building plugins, | plus hosting /maintenance. | | At OpsLevel, we're focused on a much more turnkey | solution. We want to get you up and running in under an | hour, not weeks / months. | derkoe wrote: | Just saw this video where a similar platform is introduced | https://youtu.be/Abdp_BnRIx0 This is the website | https://kustodian.io/ | | It has more features including onboarding, access control, | etc | x3ro wrote: | It's too early to say, unfortunately (which is why my initial | post was not super useful, admittedly). All I can say for now | is that, in all likelihood, a _lot_ of customization will be | needed. Ask me again in two months :D | mcdonje wrote: | His org used jira but not confluence? Why couldn't they just | document these things in confluence? | | Edit: This is a serious question. What is that value prop of | backstage over confluence? | 1123581321 wrote: | Structure of the data and more pleasant/immediate workflow | increases adoption so it doesn't go stale, like Confluence so | often does. Some teams need those nudges more than others due | to personality, turnover, speed of growth and complexity of | service architecture. | skrtskrt wrote: | backstage has plugins that can help with autodiscovery of a lot | of this stuff. | | The stuff that's not autodiscovered can live right next to your | code, in any repository, so devs can just update some YAML keys | when they're making other changes. | | You can lint the backstage changes as part of PRs | | Also I've never _ever_ seen developers consistently keep stuff | up to date in Confluence. There 's just so much friction in | that interface. | mcdonje wrote: | Auto-discovery does sound appealing. Thank you. | rdonovan wrote: | Author here. We did use Confluence, but as other folks had | said, it went very stale. Not everyone could edit everything | and there was no structure. Confluence is a mess in my | experience. | polotics wrote: | Also Confluence and JIRA end up weirdly competing, with | information spread between the two, sliced up chronologically | in JIRA, and based on some a-priori and/or competing sets of | structurations... | WesleyJohnson wrote: | Have to agree. Without a clear set of standards on how to | structure things, it ends up being chaos very quickly. We had | a PM for a while, who gravitated more towards QA, and when | they got ahold of Confluence they went crazy (in a mostly | good way). We had so many great "How To" articles on how to | perform various tasks in our system form an internal user | perspective, all authored by the same SME. | | Unfortunately, given their affinity for testing things, the | How To docs starting taking on that QA perspective and | everything ended up in a QA "space". Sure, it's easy to move | them around, but there wasn't a clear cut way on how to | separate the "How To" from the "QA" - and then they left. | | Since then, people add things when managers say "make sure | that's in Confluence" and it ends up getting placed in the | areas they're most familiar with, not necessarily where it | should be. Add in the aforementioned lack of standards and no | two documents look the same. Then we started using Confluence | for devs to write Test Plans and QA to execute them - and now | it just makes my brain hurt whenever I have to go in there. | | Some of it is a cultural problem: we're email and Teams heavy | and so much of our "documentation" is buried in those tools. | So then we adopt something like Confluence to move our | knowledge base to that, but finding stuff in Teams is a | nightmare (posted in another thread on that). So now rather | than having one tool to rule them all, we just have another | half-baked attempt. | | We're monolithic for the most part, so I'm not sure Backstage | would help us, but the article mentioned Stack Overflow for | Teams, so maybe that would? (insert relevant XKCD here on | competing standards) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-22 23:00 UTC)