If our goal is to make our lives and the lives of those that work with us easier and happier, Backstage Software Templates can give us a hand. This tool can help us create Components inside Backstage that will load code skeletons, fill in some variables and publish that template somewhere. Let’s get this party started If you’ve been following along, in Backstage intro we set up our Backstage installation locally and, conveniently, bootstrapped a lot of components, including Software Templates....

Documentation, that thing everyone complains about but few want to create or maintain. However, good documentation is priceless, and the less painful it is to create, maintain and access the more valuable it becomes. TechDocs is Backstages’s docs-as-code built-in solution and this basically means we can write our documentation in files that live together with our code. It’s based on MkDocs although there are plans to support other types of sources....

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....