Rafay Systems Adds Backstage Plugin to K8s Management Platform

Rafay Systems added support for the open source Backstage application developer portal to its Kubernetes management platform.

Abhinav Mishra, senior product manager for Rafay Systems, said Backstage plugins for the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) will make it simpler to initially configure an instance of the Backstage platform with a single click; otherwise, the platform can be complex and challenging to deploy.

Originally developed by Spotify, Backstage has been gaining traction in cloud-native application environments as a platform that makes it possible for a centralized IT or platform engineering team to provision application environments on behalf of developers. The overall goal is to improve productivity by leaning more on IT operations to provision these environments so that developers can focus more on writing code. Backstage was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2020.

Rafay

Just about every DevOps team is being asked to find ways to help improve developer productivity as organizations try to do more with fewer resources. The challenge is that both Kubernetes and Backstage can be difficult to provision and maintain.

Rafay Systems has been making a case for its KOP platform to automate management of fleets of Kubernetes clusters that is accessible to IT administrators and DevOps teams via a graphical interface.

A recent Rafay Systems survey found that developers are not especially keen to provision infrastructure themselves. Developers identified a number of issues, including a lack of automation between DevOps and core developer workflows (55%), rolling out environments for applications taking too long (41%), it takes too much time to learn about and stay up-to-date with how to provision environments (36%) and it’s too complicated to provision environments (33%).

The survey found that developers are more likely to be frustrated, unsatisfied or somewhat unsatisfied with the provisioning process (52%) compared with 61% of platform engineers who are very satisfied with their organization’s current process for environment provisioning.

Among the 39% of platform engineers that are unsatisfied, issues included the lack of a standard way to deploy and manage environments (43%), too much time and effort required to train development teams on how to provision environments (41%), lack of visibility into environment resources including usage, costs and performance metrics (38%) and lack of governance (35%) and too few guardrails around operations (27%).

The survey also found 61% of developers and platform engineers reporting that environment provisioning is a major roadblock to accelerating the timeframe for application deployments, with 25% taking three months or longer to deploy a modern application or service. Nearly half (45%) of respondents are not satisfied or just somewhat satisfied with their current process. Nearly all platform teams (94%) and application developers (89%) believed it would be valuable to have a self-service workflow or portal such as Backstage where developers can provision environments themselves.

Issues identified by both developers and platform engineers included having to wait on someone else or on a ticketing-based system to provision environments (57%), the fact that there are too many software/service dependencies between the application and the environment that need to be tested/approved/validated (49%), that it takes too long to gain/configure/approve access to new environments (30%) and a lack of automation to procure environments or environments that instead must be manually deployed (27%).

Clearly, when it comes to provisioning and maintaining Kubernetes clusters, there’s lots of room for improvement. The challenge now is determining who is going to be in charge of doing what on behalf of whom.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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