backstage
C4-PlantUML
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backstage | C4-PlantUML | |
---|---|---|
125 | 23 | |
26,016 | 5,948 | |
4.2% | 2.0% | |
10.0 | 7.1 | |
3 days ago | 7 days ago | |
TypeScript | PlantUML | |
Apache License 2.0 | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
backstage
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# Enable Developers on SAP BTP with Terraform, GitHub Actions and Backstage
apiVersion: scaffolder.backstage.io/v1beta3 # https://backstage.io/docs/features/software-catalog/descriptor-format#kind-template kind: Template metadata: name: sample-btpsubaccount-remote-template title: Remote Template for SAP BTP Subaccount Setup description: A remote template that creates a basic SAP BTP Subaccount setup tags: - sap - btp - basic - javascript spec: owner: user:guest type: service
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The 2024 Web Hosting Report
It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.
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Ask HN: How do you organize software documentation at work?
We use Confluence and markdown files in GitHub. I think we are moving a lot of our docs to Backstage [0] soon.
One process that ends up being really valuable for documentation purposes is our "Architecture Review Documents". This is a standard document that team leads fill out before starting work on a new Saga/Epic/Feature/whatever. It includes the scope and business value of a new feature or large block of work, high level technical architecture of implementation, the impact on existing database schemas and service APIs, etc. This document is presented in a meeting with technical leadership in our organization who deep dive on the topic and explore potential pitfalls in the plan.
The document and recording of that meeting live on forever, and this information is very useful when getting acquainted with a certain part of our product/codebase. You are able to read and hear clearly the intention of a certain service or module, and you can identify several relevant points of contact to ask questions to.
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Tools used by the top 1% of Platform Engineers and their Commercial Open Source Alternatives
Check the Backstage repo on GitHub
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10 open source tools that platform, SRE and DevOps engineers should consider in 2024.
Backstage - An open platform for building developer portals. [Internal Developer Portal]
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Champion Building - How to successfully adopt a developer tool
So you've just bought a new platform tool? Maybe it's Hashicorp Vault? Snyk? Backstage? You’re excited about all of the developer experience, security and other benefits you're about to unleash on your company—right? But wait…
- Terraform Self-Service platform / Internal Developer Platform solutions
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Event-Driven Architecture 101
For example, without investment, visibility into system behavior as a whole can be much more difficult in an event-driven system. Investing in something like Open Telemetry and a service catalog is a good idea. Getting started with these things are relatively simple, but if you want to store your traces somewhere that are searchable, you are going to have to either pay for a SaaS tool that ingests them or you are going to have to run and maintain an open source tool capable of this such as Jaeger. For service cataloging, Backstage is becoming a very popular option. Depending on the capabilities and the capacity of your engineering team, this might be a good option and many companies do have platform teams that provide tooling such as this. With the average salary of a platform Engineer being ~$144k, companies should think carefully on whether the benefits of an EDA are going to outweigh the cost. We will dig deeper into this in part 2 and 3 of the series.
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Tips and tricks for Backstage Software Templates
I'm a big fan of Backstage.
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Happy and Productive Engineers with Backstage
There are already a number of vendors providing IDP solutions, but we know that our industry is mainly fueled by community efforts. It's no different with IDPs - there's a great OSS project that has become the de-facto industry standard for creating a portal! I'm talking about Backstage - the framework for building delivery (developer) portals. It was created at Spotify to improve the collaboration inside the engineering department and then open-sourced - so now we all can benefit from it!
C4-PlantUML
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Documentation as Code for Cloud - C4 Model & Structurizr
C4-PlantUML: Export your model as C4-PlantUML diagrams.
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Which tools do you use to create diagrams?
PlantUML + C4 plugin;
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Add quick sketches in emacs org mode
Yes. I use this all the time for software diagramming. With c4 model (https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML) and AWS icons (https://github.com/awslabs/aws-icons-for-plantuml)
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Architecture diagrams should be code
The C4 model (https://c4model.com/) is great for architecture diagrams. You can use different tools to generate them. Here are the ones I've been using:
- D2 language, open source alternative to PlantUML
- Keep your diagrams updated with continuous delivery
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C4 model for system architecture design
3️⃣ Text-based diagramming- C4-PlantUML
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Ask HN: Confluence Alternative(s) Supporting Markdown?
> onboarding docs
yes, they're don't changing frequently
> system design docs
yes - see C4-PlantUML[1]
> meeting notes
no, unless they're directly code related like ADRs [2,3].
Although one can abuse Github Issues + comments for this, in my opinion it's better to use modern SaaS tools for this, i.e. Loom, Descript, Linear.app, etc. - you can automate this process, e.g. transcribe the meeting's recording and add the issue/repo using Github Actions.
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[1] https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML
[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/arc...
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Do you take physical notes while working on your game? Or just play around and learn by doing?
I use a combination of: * Markdown (for notes and code blocks) * Mermaid markdown (for architectural diagrams in markdown documents) * PlantUML markdown (again for arch. docs in markdown, but mainly for C4 diagrams) * a Docker container to render PlantUML markdown to images * Joplin, installed on every device I regularly use * NextCloud, to store, secure, encrypt, and make available everywhere, the markdown notes managed by Joplin
- Diagram as Code
What are some alternatives?
mermaid - Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text in a similar manner as markdown
d2 - D2 is a modern diagram scripting language that turns text to diagrams.
aws-icons-for-plantuml - PlantUML sprites, macros, and other includes for Amazon Web Services services and resources
cookiecutter - A cross-platform command-line utility that creates projects from cookiecutters (project templates), e.g. Python package projects, C projects.
atlantis - Terraform Pull Request Automation
api-management-developer-portal - Developer portal provided by the Azure API Management service.
Azure-PlantUML - PlantUML sprites, macros, and other includes for Azure services
dsl - Structurizr DSL
swagger-ui - Swagger UI is a collection of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation from a Swagger-compliant API.
c4-draw.io - Draw.io template/diagram containing C4 Model shapes. Drawio Diagrams.net
gcp-icons-for-plantuml - PlantUML sprites, macros, and other includes for Google Cloud Platform services and resources
gitops-flux-helm