A manual onboarding process for a monitoring service leads to delays, human error, and a poor developer experience due to late validation.
Backstage is a CNCF framework, originally from Spotify, that helps create internal developer portals with features like software templates, tech docs, and a software catalog.
Backstage software templates act as blueprints to automate workflows like project setup, development environment creation, and service onboarding, enforcing best practices.
Google uses a Backstage template to automate the provisioning of development environments, shifting the responsibility from infrastructure engineers to a self-service platform.
A template is defined by four key sections: metadata for identification, input parameters for the UI, actions for automation logic, and outputs for results like PR links.
A template can create a new Go repository in Azure DevOps with a predefined structure, including a Dockerfile and CI/CD pipeline, to enforce organizational standards.
ZEISS automated the process for teams to gain access to a centralized container registry using a self-service Backstage template that handles validation and infrastructure changes.
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.