Internal Developer Platforms

From Zero to Fully Operational Developer Platform in 5 Steps!

Internal Developer Platforms or IDPs are not hard to create. Anyone can do it, as long as that someone knows everything about everything.

Today I’ll show you everything you should know about developer platforms. We’ll go through all the principles behind them, through all the components they should have, and I’ll even show you how to build one. This will be a tutorial on how to build a platform in 4 mandatory and 1 optional step.

At the end of today’s journey, we’ll have a fully operational IDP with everything you might need. Most likely…

Why I Changed My Mind About Backstage? A Brutally Honest Opinion

I was very negative towards Backstage. Some of the architectural choices are, in my opinion, bad. The way to install plugins is just silly. The quality of most of the plugins is very low. The need to rebuild container image every time we make a change is something I thought we will never see again. And so on and so forth.

Now, however, my impressions about Backstage changed. Actually, that’s not true. I still stand behind everything I said about it. What changed is the additional impression. Now I think I get it. Now I think I understand why Backstage makes sense, why it is one of the most contributed project and why it might make sense to adopt it even though it’s bad.

From UX to API: Mastering Platform Validations with Kubernetes Validating Admission Policies

Validations are extremely important when building Internal Developer Platforms, or any platforms for that matter. They serve two primary purposes. They help us ensure that user’s requests are valid before they are processed by the platform and they make user experience better. The problem, however, is that people mix those two all the time. One is ensuring that something is valid and the other is improving user experience without guaranteering validity of the requests. The first group are “real” policies while the other is just UX.

Full Application Setup in Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with Crossplane

What if I tell you that fifty of so lines of YAML will get you everything you might need to work on an application. What if everything includes Git repo, branches, pull requests, CI workflows, scripts needed both for local development and CI, Dockerfile, a bunch of Kubernetes resources and quite a few other things you might need. What if everything is really everything and, at the same time, tailor-made for your specific needs?

Is This the End of Crossplane? Compose Kubernetes Resources with kro

Whomever is building developer platforms is bound to come to the conclusion that there is a need to compose resources and expose those compositions through APIs. If a developer needs a database, they should be able to specify what that database should be without having to deal with subnets, VPCs, internet gateways, and other lower-level components that are required, but are not important for the vast majority of people who just want a database. We are likely to come to a similar conclusion if, for example, a developer wants to run an application. That developer might want to specify a container image, a port, and a host without having to worry about Kubernetes Deployments, Services, Ingresses, Scalers, VirtualServices, and other lower-level Kubernetes types of objects.

From Docker to Kubernetes: Running Backstage in Production!

Backstage is great, or not, depending how you look at it. In any case, the important thing to note is that the only thing we’re getting is source code. Since it’s written in TypeScript, we can run it by executing yarn this and that or node this and something else. While that’s probably okay while developing it, it is silly when running it in production or anywhere else other than our laptops. It’s not 1999 any more. Today we package almost everything into container images and, from there on, you might be runnning it in Docker while I scream at you trying to explain why Docker is not a good idea for anything that should run in production. More likely, you are running your applications in Kubernetes, or as Azure Container Apps, or through Google Cloud Run, or anywhere else. What matters is that OCI images are the standard, no matter whether we run something as containers or anything else.

Internal Developer Platform Day 2 Operations Solved with Kubernetes and Crossplane

I did it. No! We did it. Actually, that’s not correct either. Someone else did it. Doesn’t matter who did it. What matters is that one of, in my opinion, big problems has been solved. Developers can now not only create, update, and remove their applications and infrastructure, but they can also get to know what’s happening with the resources they are managing.

Getting Started with Backstage: From Zero to Operational Dev Portal

Today we’re going to explore Backstage from newbee perspective. We’ll see what it is, what it’s main components are, and how to set it up. We’ll go from nothing to an operational portal in development mode. Unlike other similar tools that often require us to simply configure and run them, with Backstage we have to get the source code, develop or configure what we need, and run it on our laptop to see the result. Later on, once we’re happy with what we did we might explore how to package it all up, run it in production, and do whatever else needs to be done.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Surviving Backstage with Roadie: A Developer Nightmare or Dream?

Today I want to talk about potentially the most important tool in your toolbox. I want to talk about a tool that might enable everyone in your organization to be more productive and self-sufficient. Yet, the tool I want to talk about might win an award for the least user-friendly, hardest to maintain, and, generally speaking, a tool that might cause you to have nightmares and spend a small fortune on a psychologist.

It’s a tool that I recognize as being one of the most impactful tools which, honestly, I do not like at all, yet most of those who use it swear by it.

Did you guess what that tool is?

Automate Everything: How One Manifest Powers Your Entire DevOps Pipeline

Today I want to get back to the first steps when developer platforms are concerned. I want to enable developers to start a new project.

Mastering Developer Portals: Discover & Integrate API Schemas with Port

I am so dissaspointed with developer portal consoles for ignoring the fact that almost everything is discoverable through APIs. Why should I design forms and fields in Backstage if Backstage should be able to ask an API for a schema? Even if that schema is not exactly what I need and I might have to remove parts of it, that’s still easier and better than starting from scratch. It’s a waste of time to do the same thing over and over again. We should define what we have, expose that through an API, and all other tools should just “discover” it. Just as that’s true for, let’s say, kubectl, it should be true for graphical user interfaces.

Hence, I spent months complaining about it and… I got it.

How Platform Engineering Compares to Running a Restaurant

Platform engineering should follow similar patterns as restaurants, yet we often confuse it with a kitchen or a supermarket.

Let me explain.