backstage VS gRPC

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

Backstage is an open-source platform developed by Spotify for managing the entire lifecycle of developer infrastructure, including services, APIs, documentation, and more. Backstage streamlines the development process through its centralized and customizable platform, offering a unified dashboard that consolidates information on projects, services, and infrastructure. Acting as a service catalog enhances transparency by allowing teams to document and discover internal services easily. Backstage's extensible architecture supports a robust plugin ecosystem, enabling teams to tailor the platform to their specific workflows and preferences. The platform promotes collaboration, accelerates onboarding through standardized documentation, and integrates seamlessly with various DevOps tools.

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.

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.

[0] https://backstage.io/

Check the Backstage repo on GitHub

Backstage - An open platform for building developer portals. [Internal Developer Portal]

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…

The idea is to have a central point where people can find standards, documentation, and designs. The team can do this with a specialized tool like Backstage, Confluence, Github, Google Docs, or some internal implementation. The software is not the most important thing here, but having an easy way to find what is needed for the person to be more productive.

gRPC, built on HTTP/2, inherently supports flow control. The server can push updates, but it must also respect flow control signals from the client, ensuring that it doesn't send data faster than what the client can handle.

Yes, grpc_cli tool uses essentially the same mechanism except implemented as a grpc service rather than as a stubby service. The basic principle of both is implementing the C++ proto library's DescriptorDatabase interface with cached recursive queries of (usually) the server's compiled in FileDescriptorProtos.

See also https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/server-reflecti...

The primary difference between what grpc does and what stubby does is that grpc uses a stream to ensure that the reflection requests all go to the same server to avoid incompatible version skew and duplicate proto transmissions. With that said, in practice version skew is rarely a problem for grpc_cli style "issue a single RPC" usecases: even if requests do go to two or more different versions of a binary that might have incompatible proto graphs, it is very common for the request and response and RPC to all be in the same proto file so you only need to make one RPC in the first place unless you're using an extension mechanism like proto2 extensions or google.protobuf.Any.

While gRPC and Apache Thrift have served the microservice architecture well, CloudWeGo's advanced features and performance metrics set it apart as a promising open source solution for the future.

The loadBalancingConfig is what we use in order to decide which policy to go for (round_robin in this case). This JSON representation is based on a protobuf message, then why does the name resolver returns it in the JSON format? The main reason is that loadBalancingConfig is a oneof field inside the proto message and so it can not contain values unknown to the gRPC if used in the proto format. The JSON representation does not have this requirement so we can use a custom loadBalancingConfig .

The Dart implementation of gRPC which puts mobile and HTTP/2 first. It's built and maintained by the Dart team. gRPC is a high-performance RPC (remote procedure call) framework that is optimized for efficient data transfer.

gRPC is a high-performance, open-source RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework initially developed by Google. It uses Protocol Buffers for serialization and supports bidirectional streaming.

In general, tunneling through HTTP2 turns out to be a great choice. There is a RPC protocol built on top of HTTP2: gRPC[1].

This is because HTTP2 is great at exploiting a TCP connection to transmit and receive multiple data structures concurrently - multiplexing.

There may not be a reason to use HTTP3 however, as QUIC already provides multiplexing.

I expect that in the future most communications will be over encrypted HTTP2 and QUIC simply because middleware creators can not resist to discriminate.

[1] <https://grpc.io>

Even in the https://grpc.io blog says this

gRPC