examples VS backstage

Honeycomb

I haven't used anything else, but I'll gladly shill for https://honeycomb.io.

With all of this in place I went a step further and added Opentelemetry to track the stats of how often the routine was being triggered on Honeycomb.

Events can be used in many meaningful ways. The Event subsystem of B is pretty much a co-evolution of what honeycomb.io offers, but implemented completely differently - it is on bare-metal, and hence a lot cheaper. Because of that, B never subsampled, but always kept a full low of all events anywhere, no exceptions.

It should be noted that this is a very oblique ad for http://honeycomb.io. That in no way impugns the content of the post, and in fact, it's given the content of the post that I feel compelled to point out that, ultimately, this is an ad. Because what is sales and advertising, anyway? It's just a way to get you to buy a product, and you can't do that if you've never even heard about the product. I'm not currently in the market for an observability solution (something something splunk) but if I were, I've now heard of them.

The question though, is why does money ruin everything? The naive questions of an open source zealot to a proprietary software salesperson are one thing, but since we all need money to live, why does money being part of the equation (eg if someone was getting paid to post here) ruin things? Would a "donate to open source" button be more successful if the donate text is "buy me a coffee", "buy me a beer", or "upgrade my beer from Coors light"?

https://xkcd.com/2347/ was and is true, and if we don't figure out a way to change that, I don't really see a future for open source.

Very cool to see honeycomb.io is doing that. I'm about to embark on my distributed tracing learning journey, this makes me want to try honeycomb right away.

Caveat: I work for a vendor in the O11y space (https://honeycomb.io) as a Developer Advocate, however, this advice is generic, not specific to our platform.

I spent Day 2 at the Colony Club to attend OTel Unplugged. This event was sponsored by Lightstep, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Crowdstrike, and NGINX. I came into the event not knowing what to expect. I can sometimes clamp up when I’m around folks that I don’t know, but because I was helping with the event check-in, I got to say hello to a number of the attendees, which helped break the ice. And it turns out that there were a lot of names that I recognized from my work in the OTel community, and it was nice to connect in person with folks whom I’d only previously met through Slack or Zoom.

It's no surprise that my apps are mostly written using Sanic as I'm pretty involved with the project. I've been wanting to start testing honeycomb out as well, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to try out.

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.