Now that we have an idea of what Backstage is and can do and of what is under the hood we can start to explore some of its features. In this post, we’ll explore the Backstage Catalog. What is the Catalog? The Backstage Catalog aims to be the centralized hub to track ownership and metadata of all the software in our ecosystem (services, APIs, libraries, data pipelines, etc). Metadata YAML files are at the heart of the Catalog, alongside the code, and will enable Backstage to collect it and make it visible....

In Backstage intro we talked about what kinds of problems Backstage aims to solve and got our first taste of how to launch and play with it. Although we’re now ready to start getting our hands dirty we’ll take a moment to understand the pieces that make Backstage the great piece of software that it is. This will give us a better feel for what’s under the hood and how everything fits together....

We have multiple teams that have to, somehow, work together to achieve goals. Obviously, we have documentation, API specifications, monitoring systems, alerting systems, dashboards, CI/CD systems, logging systems, infrastructure, and so on. We keep jumping from system to system to find and correlate information. We need to find that API specification. We need to find those dashboards to check why our services are misbehaving. We need to check the build system to figure out why the build failed....

In software, a vulnerability is a weakness or a glitch that can be targeted with the intent of exploiting the system. When done by a bad actor, that exploitation aims at making us look bad, making our projects look bad, making our companies look bad. That can translate into a loss of credibility (and revenue) and, in some extreme cases, can be the “death” of a company. Shift left security refers to moving security sooner in the development process....

Certifications serve as an indication that a certain level of competence was achieved and many successful professionals seek them in order to reap several rewards. In some fields they’re mandatory and while in others they’re not, they usually come with several benefits attached. Credibility Certifications establish a certain level of proficiency that helps cement credibility. It is proof that we know what we’re doing. More so, it’s an external validation of our skills from a credible source....