Garanti del Talento

dgt_plat10 – Backstage Developer Portal

Module Title: dgt_plat10 – Backstage Developer Portal

Description:

Backstage is the open source framework for building developer portals, created at Spotify and now a CNCF project. It gives developers a single place to find services, documentation, owners and the actions they can perform on the platform. This module explains its building blocks and how to run a Backstage instance that a platform team can maintain over time.

Module Objectives:

  1. Software Catalog: Model components, APIs, resources, systems, domains, users and groups, and keep the catalog in sync with Git through catalog-info.yaml files.

  2. Software Templates: Use the scaffolder to create new services from templates: repository, CI pipeline, documentation and catalog registration in one step.

  3. TechDocs: Publish documentation written in Markdown next to the code, following the docs-like-code approach.

  4. Plugins: Extend Backstage with plugins for Kubernetes, CI/CD, monitoring and security, using the new backend and frontend systems.

  5. Operating Backstage: Deploy Backstage on Kubernetes with PostgreSQL, configure authentication with an identity provider, manage upgrades and permissions.

Module Content:

  • Catalog design: Ownership, lifecycle and relations: making the catalog useful instead of a list of repositories.

  • Integrations: Connecting Backstage to GitLab or GitHub, to the Kubernetes clusters and to the observability stack.

  • Search and discoverability: Making services, APIs and documentation easy to find.

  • Scorecards: Using catalog data to track production readiness and adoption of the golden paths.

  • Alternatives: When a full Backstage installation is worth it, and lighter alternatives for small teams.

Hands-on lab in natural language:

Students guide the AI agent to deploy Backstage on the lab Kubernetes cluster with PostgreSQL and login through the GDT identity provider. They import the existing lab projects into the catalog, write TechDocs for one of them and create a first software template. Students verify ownership and relations in the catalog and review every configuration file the agent wrote.

Target Audience:

This module is for students who have completed the Linux, DevOps and Containers modules, and for system administrators, DevOps engineers and SREs who want to move towards Platform Engineering. Experience with Kubernetes is recommended.

The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy