I have spent a good bit of the last couple weeks researching Platform Engineering. The concept behind it feels appropriate for scaling out traditional DevOps via an Internal Development Platform (IDP).

You can't talk about IDPs without touching on a UI portal, so I first stood up Backstage. My first attempt at running the app was in a Kubernetes cluster. While the helm chart was simple to deploy the configuration was horrid. The default container comes with no plugins. To even kick the tires, I quickly backed off to trying to run it locally. It wasn't until I got the application running that I figured out that Backstage is meant to be a "product" of the Platform Engineering team. You literally have to change code to integrate with plugins. After over a decade of using a plugin based developer tool like Jenkins, I can't believe companies are investing so much time to roll their own opinionated portals.

This 2.5 hour video was one of the most comprehensive on how to configure Backstage:

The Ultimate Backstage Guide (2024 Version) - Backstage with OrkoHunter

It is a good starting place for those new to Backstage. Don't make the same mistake and jump to a container + cluster deploy. There is also a demo UI for those who want to try it out before downloading the Backstage code from GitHub.

My followup task is to take a step back and look at a more middle layer Platform Engineering tool, like Score.