backstage VS gRPC

Compare backstage vs gRPC and see what are their differences.

gRPC

The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#) (by grpc)
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backstage gRPC
125 200
26,016 40,532
4.2% 1.2%
10.0 9.9
2 days ago about 9 hours ago
TypeScript C++
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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

Posts with mentions or reviews of backstage. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-18.
  • # Enable Developers on SAP BTP with Terraform, GitHub Actions and Backstage
    2 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2024
    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
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    37 projects | dev.to | 20 Feb 2024
    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.
  • Ask HN: How do you organize software documentation at work?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2024
    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/

  • Tools used by the top 1% of Platform Engineers and their Commercial Open Source Alternatives
    3 projects | dev.to | 12 Jan 2024
    Check the Backstage repo on GitHub
  • 10 open source tools that platform, SRE and DevOps engineers should consider in 2024.
    5 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    Backstage - An open platform for building developer portals. [Internal Developer Portal]
  • Champion Building - How to successfully adopt a developer tool
    3 projects | dev.to | 11 Dec 2023
    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
    2 projects | /r/devops | 28 Nov 2023
  • Event-Driven Architecture 101
    3 projects | dev.to | 25 Sep 2023
    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.
  • Tips and tricks for Backstage Software Templates
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Aug 2023
    I'm a big fan of Backstage.
  • Happy and Productive Engineers with Backstage
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 Jun 2023
    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!

gRPC

Posts with mentions or reviews of gRPC. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-09.
  • Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions from Compiled Binaries
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Mar 2024
    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.

  • Delving Deeper: Enriching Microservices with Golang with CloudWeGo
    7 projects | dev.to | 22 Feb 2024
    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.
  • gRPC Name Resolution & Load Balancing on Kubernetes: Everything you need to know (and probably a bit more)
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Feb 2024
    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 .
  • Dart on the Server: Exploring Server-Side Dart Technologies in 2024
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
    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.
  • Usando Spring Boot RestClient
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
  • How to Build & Deploy Scalable Microservices with NodeJS, TypeScript and Docker || A Comprehesive Guide
    13 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2024
    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.
  • Actual SSH over HTTPS
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Dec 2023
    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>

  • SGSG (Svelte + Go + SQLite + gRPC) - open source application
    5 projects | /r/sveltejs | 6 Dec 2023
    gRPC
  • Level UP your RDBMS Productivity in GO
    5 projects | dev.to | 5 Dec 2023
    I have decided to use gRPC because it's a very simple protocol and it's very easy to use.
  • Create Production-Ready SDKs with Goa
    9 projects | dev.to | 22 Nov 2023
    Goa generates gRPC code for you. gRPC is an efficient alternative to plain HTTP, over which you can provide your API. It requires the use of protocol buffers, made by Google. Our repository already provides the protoc app for you, in completed_app/lib.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing backstage and gRPC you can also consider the following projects:

ZeroMQ - ZeroMQ core engine in C++, implements ZMTP/3.1

Apache Thrift - Apache Thrift

Cap'n Proto - Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library

zeroRPC - zerorpc for python

rpclib - rpclib is a modern C++ msgpack-RPC server and client library

nanomsg - nanomsg library

RPyC - RPyC (Remote Python Call) - A transparent and symmetric RPC library for python

asio-grpc - Asynchronous gRPC with Asio/unified executors

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.

bloomrpc - Former GUI client for gRPC services. No longer maintained.