shipit-engine VS backstage

For example: shipit was a homebrew deployment system Shopify made, and they open-sourced it because there's nothing about how they ship their code that's a trade secret or worth hiding.

> Usually that was in the form of long-running network calls.

That's why doing a network call to another service in the middle of a request is pretty much banned from the monolith. Anything that doesn't have a strict SLO is done from background jobs that can take longer, be retried etc.

Now you mention FedEx so I presume you were working on the shipping service, which by essence is kind of an API bridge so it's probably why it was deemed acceptable there, but that's far cry from what a typical Rails app look like, except maybe in companies that do a lot of micro-services and are forced to do inline requests.

> that's not a use case that Ruby/Rails are built to elegantly handle.

I'd argue the contrary, the elegant way to handle this is to perform these calls from background jobs. Look at shipit [0] for instance, it's syncing with the GitHub API constantly but doesn't do a single API call from inside a request cycle, every single API call is handled asynchronously from background jobs.

[0] https://github.com/Shopify/shipit-engine/

My team is evaluating different deployment tools to replace our homegrown solution.

There are plenty of continuous integration tools (GitHub Actions, CircleCi, etc.), but adding deployment aware logic like canary deployments and having an audit log of deploys requires adding lots of code which I'd rather not maintain.

I'm looking for tools focused on code deployment. A quick search turned up shipit (https://github.com/Shopify/shipit-engine) and teletraan (https://github.com/pinterest/teletraan).

Are there other open-source deployment tools like those projects?

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.