Module Title: dgt_plat10 – Golden Paths Lab: Backstage + Crossplane on OpenStack
Description:
This final lab puts the whole module together and builds a small sovereign Internal Developer Platform: Backstage as the portal, Crossplane as the API and control plane, Kubernetes and OpenStack as the infrastructure, all running on hardware the academy controls. Students implement the golden path they designed in the introduction and measure whether it actually improves the developer experience.
Module Objectives:
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End-to-end Self-service: From a Backstage template, create a new service with its repository, CI pipeline, Kubernetes namespace and OpenStack resources through the AppEnvironment API.
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GitOps Flow: Make the template open a pull request with the AppEnvironment resource, and let Argo CD or Flux apply it after review.
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Visibility: Show the status of the Crossplane resources, the Kubernetes workloads and the documentation of the service in the Backstage catalog.
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Day-2 Actions: Add self-service actions for scaling, creating a new environment and decommissioning a service cleanly.
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Evaluation: Measure lead time, number of manual steps and developer feedback before and after the platform.
Module Content:
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Architecture review: How portal, control plane, GitOps and infrastructure are connected, and where each responsibility lies.
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Security: Least-privilege credentials, approvals for production and audit trail of every change.
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Sovereignty check: Verifying that data, control plane and tools all run on infrastructure under the academy's control, and documenting the exit plan.
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Failure scenarios: What developers see when a composition fails, and how the platform team is alerted.
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Presentation: Each team presents its platform as a product: users, value, roadmap.
Hands-on lab in natural language:
Working in teams, students describe the platform in natural language and let the AI agents build it on the GDT lab infrastructure, reviewing each change before it is merged. At the end, a student who has never seen the platform must create and deploy a new service using only the Backstage portal, while the team observes and collects feedback.
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