Thanks to Backstage core features, the spreadsheet for service ownership is no longer necessary. "@typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin": "^v4.33.0". The service assessment is a manual tool where teams can discuss aspects necessary for an application and raise discussions about good software development practices, in addition to proposing ideas of how to improve the application quality. 14e980acee: ESLint upgraded to version 8 and all it's plugins updated to newest version. Each project is represented as a card containing its most relevant data to give an overview of the project. How can we relate microservices metrics to their respective squads and tribes? When a tech company starts to scale increasing the number of services and engineers, the visualization of resources and tracking of ownership becomes distressed. The Software Template helps a lot in standardizing the creation of services, a simple example is Spotifys Golden Path. "@typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin": "^5.9.0". This exciting announcement builds upon the collaboration we announced with Spotify last year to deliver developer portals to a number of clients, most notably with TELUS. 10f26e8883: Modify queries to perform better by filtering on sub-queries as well, 1628ca3f49: Fix an issue where the TechDocs sidebar is hidden when the Backstage sidebar is pinned at smaller screen sizes, 2260702efd: Properly exported all referenced types, @backstage/plugin-newrelic-dashboard@0.1.3, @backstage/plugin-tech-insights-backend@0.1.5, @backstage/plugin-code-coverage-backend@0.1.19, @backstage/plugin-search-backend-node@0.4.4, @backstage/plugin-techdocs-backend@0.12.3, @backstage/plugin-tech-insights-backend-module-jsonfc@0.1.5, @backstage/plugin-permission-backend@0.3.0, @backstage/plugin-kubernetes-backend@0.4.3, @backstage/plugin-scaffolder-backend-module-rails@0.2.3. 3f08dcd696: For the component EntityMembersListCard you can now specify the type of members you have in a group. Increasing observability possibilities on e2e tests, Making all the engineering tools easily accessible/updated for everyone. Below you can see an example of this file: But in order to trust this as a source of truth for our automation, we had to consider: For this, we created an architecture to validate and notify our engineers. The main concept is that we created a package using Golang to allow validating our checklists. But we didnt stop there, with the entities being created and updated into Backstage we developed some plugins internally to help us track service quality. Nowadays these are the main features of Backstage provided at the core, but they have also a list of useful plugins that can be installed individually, which you can find in the Plugins Marketplace. Several plugins being developed in a very short time and joining the CNCF were motivating us to not only use Backstage but also contribute and be part of the community. With the possibility of connecting components (applications, repositories, resources) with squad and tribes into Backstage, we were able to give visibility to our engineers about applications ownership, giving them much more transparency. We have followed this approach so that other automation can consume these push events and perform automation from them. Thinking about the Service Catalog, we knew the complexity and the effort that we would have to invest to develop something completely from scratch. Essentially a marketplace for internal projects suitable for Inner Sourcing. To be able to accomplish this mission Backstage has some main features. For more information on how were working with Spotify and others in the Backstage community to make developers lives easier and improve productivity, please contact us at deveffectiveness@thoughtworks.com. So, using organization-workflows we could run a single GitHub Action for our entire organization. The Backstage ecosystem and community surprised us. Understand how your cloud usage impacts our environment and what you can do about it via the Backstage developer portal. If the Bazaar project is linked to an entity, the card is also visible on that entity's EntityPage. Below we can see a simple representation of how the code looked in relation to the fields of the file: Due to the number of repositories and projects that we have in our CI system, adding a step in each pipeline was an unfeasible alternative for us. Fill Bazaar-tab with more content, for example images and achievements, Show all the members that have joined the project, Extend the dialogue for adding a project with more fields, e.g. From this data, we populate Backstage Service Catalog through a Processor that we developed. 19f0f93504: Catch errors from a fact retriever and log them. "As part of Spotify's pathway to net-zero emissions, we leverage Backstage's automation and visibility capabilities to engage our developers in climate advocacy," said Tyson Singer, head of Technology and Platforms at Spotify. tests. Improve the visualization of our microservices including its ownership, in a way that reflects how our engineering teams were organized. 34883f5c9e: Added possibility to pass customized title and description for the scorecards instead of using hardcoded ones. Using a YAML file as template new services could be created allowing to add the right resources to it. Which team should we contact to know about business rules? Certainly, we have thought about creating our own service and not using an open-source tool to do so. If so, the worker validates if this file is filled correctly, consequently, we aggregate some information from GitHub itself, such as the topics that that repository has, and insert it in an Amazon DynamoDB table. Following Spotifys Hack Week, the CCF plugin was published in the Backstage plugin marketplace, which offers open source features to an adopters Backstage deployment. This works around an issue where cookies would not be set if TLS termination was handled in a proxy rather than having the backend served directly with HTTPS. Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open-source project, sponsored by Thoughtworks Inc. under theApache License, Version 2.0. The resulting CCF plugin we created enables developer teams to make strategic decisions that optimize their cloud infrastructure and reduce their carbon footprint. And add a permissions field to the PluginEnvironment type in packages/backend/src/types.ts: @backstage/plugin-permission-common and @backstage/plugin-permission-node will need to be installed as dependencies: ## @backstage/plugin-analytics-module-ga@0.1.6, ## @backstage/plugin-apache-airflow@0.1.3. faf844e269: Update @asyncapi/react-component to 1.0.0-next.26, which will fix the With Backstages 150+ publicly listed adopters, even more developers now have a new way to gain visibility around the cloud carbon emissions of their projects and to identify concrete actions towards climate goals. TechDocs is a feature that brings the docs-like-code idea, which is, bringing the documentation about your service living together with the source code and being accessible by any developer. From that card it is possible to either link or unlink an entity to a project, edit or delete the project and join the project if it seems interesting to you. Inside QuintoAndar the tools are dynamically provisioned and can have their addresses changed. The Bazaar also provides an easy way to manage, catalog, and browse these Inner Sourcing friendly projects and components. ResizeObserver loop limit exceeded errors which we encountered in several E2E Another option is to check which repositories in our organization do not have a. It looks up the app configuration based on the url. Keeping our developers up to date with news is always a challenge and not addressing this issue has a strong impact on engineering productivity. Automate tedious processes. Being able to use Backstage and contribute to It is something that motivates us. Teams or Discord link, Make it possible for multiple Bazaar project to link to the same catalog entity. The Bazaar ensures that new Inner Sourcing friendly projects gain visibility through Backstage and a way for interested engineers to show their interest and in the future contribute with their specific skill set. Only documenting tools location and how to access them wasnt scalable enough for our scenario. Can we find out how many services each squad/tribe is the owner of? Our Application Security team used Backstage to show vulnerabilities data from various sources within the component tab, giving more visibility into the security aspect of each repository, fostering a culture of security within engineering. It provides a head start to developers improving productivity and dev experience. @backstage/plugin-scaffolder-backend-module-cookiecutter@0.1.8, @backstage/plugin-scaffolder-backend@0.15.20. [3]. With that, the documentation is quite easily searchable and accessible to anyone who needs it. bdf1419d20: Adds two new home components - CompanyLogo and Toolkit. Template Software is a mechanism that allows the creation of components inside Backstage directly through the user interface with a few clicks. It is a concise summary of all production availability standards and requirements, a set of questions that help to classify whether the service is ready to go into production. Although all the main Backstage features have attracted our attention, issues such as documentation and resource creation are challenges that we already have some tools to help our developers in their daily use and that even deserve a dedicated blog post. The Service Catalog is one of the most important features of Backstage, it is through it that we can store data related to services, libraries, data pipelines. This plugin brings the functionality of the open source project Cloud Carbon Footprint into Backstage as an officially published plugin on the Backstage Plugin Marketplace. Considering our use case, we have a worker that consumes these events and validates if the push was done on the repositorys default branch, which most of the time is the main or master branch, once this push has been done we validate if there is a .checklist.yaml file in that repository. Connecting QuintoAndar engineering to this developer portal framework will certainly help us to solve more and more challenges ahead. This GitHub workflow basically reads the .checklist.yaml file and makes a request to our checklist validation API creating a check-run. This will be remedied in a future update that allows the backend to configured for trusted proxy mode. Ensure that the values that are filled in are valid and that developers would be notified in case of changes to the expected values. Now that we can trust the ownership data, we aim to use it to achieve high-quality services creation from scratch. It handles multiple app configurations. Getting started guide: https://docs.rootly.com/integrations/backstage. Modify your app routes in packages/app/src/App.tsx to include the Bazaar component exported from the plugin, for example: Add a Bazaar icon to the Sidebar to easily access the Bazaar. For example: If left empty it will by default use 'Members'. QuintoAndar is a company that uses technology as its main growth driver through several open-source community tools such as Kubernetes, ArgoCD, ArgoWorkflows, Apache Airflow, and Prometheus, we always strive to be close to the community. ## @backstage/plugin-badges-backend@0.1.15, ## @backstage/plugin-bazaar-backend@0.1.6, ## @backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-ldap@0.3.9, ## @backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-msgraph@0.2.12, ## @backstage/plugin-catalog-import@0.7.9, ## @backstage/plugin-catalog-react@0.6.11, ## @backstage/plugin-code-coverage@0.1.22, ## @backstage/plugin-code-coverage-backend@0.1.19, ## @backstage/plugin-config-schema@0.1.18, ## @backstage/plugin-cost-insights@0.11.17, ## @backstage/plugin-explore-react@0.0.10, ## @backstage/plugin-git-release-manager@0.3.8, ## @backstage/plugin-github-actions@0.4.31, ## @backstage/plugin-github-deployments@0.1.26, ## @backstage/plugin-gitops-profiles@0.3.13, ## @backstage/plugin-graphql-backend@0.1.11, ## @backstage/plugin-kafka-backend@0.2.14, ## @backstage/plugin-kubernetes-backend@0.4.3, ## @backstage/plugin-newrelic-dashboard@0.1.3. So, using Backstage to catalog our infrastructure made it easy to solve the spreadsheet and ownership problems. But like any spreadsheet, some problems started to become more and more evident: In other words, we didnt have confidence in the spreadsheet to be our source of truth about our services and which teams were working on them. Using the validator library, we exposed an endpoint that could receive the contents of a file and return if this file is valid checking if it has the fields mandatory and meets the requirements we set. (Ex: APIs error rate, latencies, vulnerabilities), Often the team responsible for that service was out of date, New services were not always inserted in the spreadsheet, Disabled or invalid emails were not updated in the spreadsheet, The repository name was not enough to correlate infrastructure resources to that microservice, New hires were unaware of the spreadsheet. We had several challenges and we know that we still have a lot to build, improving the developer experience of our developers is a principle for us to scale QuintoAndar in a healthy and efficient way. It was inspired Production-Readiness Checklist Production-Ready Microservices. Integrates with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, Google Docs, 30+ tools. NewReleases is sending notifications on new releases. Need to know to enable it? Remember the spreadsheet? We internally developed a project called Checklist-as-Code to initially solve the main problems mentioned. The image below illustrates this process. [1]. https://github.com/backstage/backstage/pull/8088#issuecomment-991183968, https://github.com/asyncapi/asyncapi-react/issues/498. https://docs.rootly.com/integrations/backstage. This core feature offers a set of resources so that the service documentation written in markdown can be centralized in Backstage.

We followed the project closely and saw the astronomical growth of the community and how much Spotify itself invested to make the project grow. We continue to reduce the fragmentation of tooling by building the most pluggable enterprise-ready incident management platform on the market. In large organizations, engineers often have limited ways of discovering or announcing the projects which could benefit from a wider development effort in terms of different expertise, experiences, and teams spread across the organization. Accessing our tools wasnt our only challenge. For that, weve added a webhook in QuintoAndars GitHub organization that sends all push events to a microservice that propagates this event to an Amazon SNS topic and consequently an AWS SQS queue. For more details check the following links: da9c59d6e0: Removed @backstage/test-utils dependency. How do we know which teams are responsible for each microservice? The data needs to be stored and accessible so that we could analyze the services of each squad and tribe. Add a tab 'My page', where your personal data is displayed. We are excited to announce our Backstage integration on the Backstage Plugin Marketplace. If youd like to be a part of and help shape awesome processes like the ones described here, join us! Being part of an open-source community saves us a lot of time not reinventing the wheel, so we can think about what matters: be the destination for housing and conquer the world. The Bazaar allows engineers and teams to open up and announce their new and exciting projects for transparent cooperation in other parts of larger organizations. "We're excited to launch this integration of Cloud Carbon Footprint so all developers in the Backstage marketplace are empowered to take actionable steps toward a cleaner future for cloud computing.". [2]. 3b4d8caff6: Allow a GitHubCredentialsProvider to be passed to the GitHub scaffolder tasks actions.

Thinking about how to solve the problems mentioned, our team started to look for a tool that can be a good fit to not only solve the issues but also empower the software development journey at QuintoAndar. From the first challenge, we mentioned it was easy to create a frontend plugin for Backstage that would consume the addresses of our tools from an API we have internally, making all developers have access to our tools grouped in each context. Here you can also search or add project to the Bazaar. Also, we have two main reasons to believe in the Backstage community: The right tool for the right problem, at the right time. With this data validated and stored, its finally time for Backstage. the possibility to add images. This year, Thoughtworks developers were invited to join Spotifys annual Hack Week 2022 focused on projects and initiatives that Make the Planet Cooler. In support of that theme, the Thoughtworks and Spotify teams partnered to build a Cloud Carbon Footprint plugin for Backstage, an open platform for building developer portals built by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Organizing the engineering structure, its accesses, cataloging resources, and making all the tools accessible to everyone, is a challenge for every company growing in a fast-paced environment. The high volume of new services has brought to us concerns about dealing with ownership: This information is valuable not only for the product teams to organize themselves but also for the platform teams to be able to create feasible cost management and incident management practices in our engineering structure. With that in mind, our platform teams started to elaborate on the idea of having a portal service so our developers could easily infrastructure and product tools. The downside of this change is that secure cookies won't be used unless the backend is directly served with HTTPS. name - name of the project on URL safe format, description - present your idea and what skills you are looking for, status - whether or not the project has started, responsible - main contact person of the project, project - link Bazaar project to existing entity in the catalog, community link - link to where the project members can communicate, e.g. With no good way to find these existing internal projects to join, the possibility of working with Inner Sourcing practices suffers. If the checklist has any validation errors, the workflow makes a comment inside the pull request so that the developer could work on the fix. Enterprise Modernization, Platforms and Cloud. How was our platform teams journey in using an open-source tool to solve our engineers experience challenges. For five days, the teams worked collaboratively to take Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) an open source tool that takes advantage of cloud APIs to provide visualizations of estimated carbon emissions on usage across AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure and built a plugin for Backstage. Incident management on Slack. As this data is specific and unique for each service and its context, we didnt want it to get lost in some documentation.

Shortcut to create incidents in Rootly via Backstage for easy access, View on-going Rootly incidents in Backstage for broader visibility, Workflow task for Send Slack Message now includes the ability to add an action button for Esclating an incident, Versioning for Rootly postmortem templates, ServiceNow supports custom fields mapping of incident metadata, Workflow task for Sending Slack Message available under Action Item workflows, Ability to handle organizations with thousands of GitHub repositories for efficiently, Schedule Postmortem Meeting task can now exclude weekends, Workflow template for renaming a Slack Channel to a Jira ticket number, PagerDuty and Opsgenie paging tasks in Workflows can now auto-match or select priority levels, Additional Workflow triggers such around creation and update of Postmortem and Causes, Fixed issue where test/training incidents were appearing on the Rootly dashboard and summary emails, Fixed issue on UI where pop-up modules rendered without the background. It is also possible to sort in alphabetical order or on the number of members. These plugins are also open source and open to contributors to constantly improve and evolve! Now we can store the data as we are able to validate the required fields. An in-depth exploration of enterprise technology and engineering excellence, Keep up to date with the latest business and industry insights for digital leaders, The place for career-building content and tips, and our view on social justice and inclusivity, An opinionated guide to technology frontiers, A model for prioritizing the digital capabilities needed to navigate uncertainty, The business execs' A-Z guide to technology, Bringing the tech-led business changes into focus, Expert insights to help your business grow, Personal perspectives from Thoughtworkers around the globe, Captivating conversations on the latest in business and tech, Learn what life is like as a Thoughtworker, By: Lisa McNally, Head of Cleantech and Sustainability and Tim Cochran, Technical Director. Customers can substitute their Rootly service catalog with their existing Backstage implementation and seamlessly ensure both platforms remain in sync. And for a long time, the solution to our problem was a spreadsheet . It is typical for developers to use more than one tool in their daily development, such as ArgoCD, Drone CI, Grafana, Thanos, and Kibana. However, QuintoAndar is a tech company and we want to be part of this growing community. For this, we created a file pattern that could be filled and versioned along with the microservice code, we called this file .checklist.yaml, and in it stored information about the team, squad, cost center, and description of which context that service was created. a67ec8527f: Exclude the AWS session token from credential validation, because it's not necessary in this context. Backstage is a popular service catalog tool open sourced by Spotify and is used by companies such as Netflix, DoorDash, Hello Fresh, and 100's of others including many of our customers. The Bazaar is a place where teams can propose projects for cross-functional team development. Simply put, Backstage is an open-source project created by Spotify and donated to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), which enables us to create a portal for developers. With "Inner Sourcing", we mean projects that are developed internally within a company, but with Open Source best practices. 7612e2856b: Clean up emptystate.svg image, removing wrong white artifact from the background, @backstage/plugin-permission-common@0.3.1, 9fbd3b90ae: fix: Register plugin to prioritise Component kind for entityRef, 451ef0aa07: Fix token pass-through for software templates using beta 3 version. With that, the Service Catalog was our first objective to bring Backstage into QuintoAndar. So, as QuintoAndar keeps growing we have a much better tool to address scalability, reliability, and testability issues delivering an amazing user experience to our final users. a2ed2c2d69: - feat: Created PullRequestsDashboardProvider for resolving team and team member relations, feat: Updated useFilterProcessor to provide teamIds for, @backstage/plugin-azure-devops-common@0.2.0, 6eb6e2dc31: Add Bazaar plugin to marketplace and some minor refactoring, 2b19fd2e94: Make sure to avoid accidental data sharing / mutation of, 0fb17da164: chore: bumping dependencies in the GraphQL modules and bringing them up to date with the latest. 20ca7cfa5f: Switched the secure cookie mode set on the express-session to use 'auto' rather than true.