May 2021 Summaries

Spotify Backstage is an open-source service catalog that enables enterprise teams to create an organized and curated collection of all business and information technology services and applications within an enterprise. It acts as a digital registry, providing a means for highly distributed enterprises to see, find, invoke, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the company. The system is designed to provide transparency and observability, making it easier to manage services and avoid duplication across multiple teams. By centralizing all services that are important to stakeholders, service catalogs like Backstage eliminate the need to develop and support local services, promoting a more streamlined development process. Additionally, Spotify Backstage provides a straightforward method to unify all infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation under a single interface, allowing developers to get a uniform overview of their software and related resources, regardless of how and where they are running. The platform also enables self-serve tech for developers, managing deployments, roll-backs, versioning configurations, and more, promoting a high degree of Ops automation and developer self-service on all levels.

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are becoming mainstream as companies seek to improve developer experience and reduce DevOps overhead. They enable self-service for developers, automate setup, and provide a platform for abstracting away infrastructure complexities. The "build vs buy" question is crucial, with factors such as cost, control, connectivity, maintenance, and tradeoffs in mind. Building an IDP from scratch can be costly, requiring significant resources and time, while using a commercial framework like Humanitec offers a more cost-effective solution with instant impact on workflows and Ops overhead. Key considerations include the need for a dedicated Platform team, security, feature control, open source, and opinionated flows. Ultimately, most companies will benefit from buying an IDP, especially as they grow beyond 20 developers, to avoid overkill and prioritize business value-added activities.

Humanitec has announced the general availability of third-party container registries as part of its Internal Developer Platform, allowing platform teams to easily manage and connect with multiple container registries across different clouds. This feature provides a centralized registry credential management solution, enabling users to register registries from various providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, and more, without worrying about switching costs or managing credentials manually. With this feature, developers can seamlessly switch between CI tools and on-premise clusters, ensuring that their container images are available when needed. The new feature simplifies the process of connecting any cluster and any CI tool to container registries, providing a secure and easy-to-use solution for platform teams.