Red Hat introduced the official release of Red Hat Device Edge, a solution designed to facilitate the deployment of edge devices. This offering comprises a specially optimized edge operating system and a supported distribution of the Kubernetes project known as MicroShift, providing customers with two deployment choices.

“We believe the future of developer productivity depends on the continued evolution and innovation of projects like Backstage, and we’re focused on making this future a reality through contributions that help simplify, extend and accelerate the development process. Donating these plug-ins to the Backstage community is a reflection of Red Hat’s commitment to helping developers meet the demands of today as they innovate for tomorrow”, said Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director of Developer Tools Product Management at Red Hat.

Red Hat emphasizes the advantages of Red Hat Device Edge, which encompass a minimal resource footprint, a uniform operational experience, flexible workload management, and simplified deployment processes.

Red Hat has rolled out Red Hat OpenShift 4.14, the most recent iteration of its platform. This update introduces the general availability of hosted control planes, offering a range of benefits such as reduced management expenses, quicker cluster provisioning, enhanced scalability, and increased security through the separation of control planes from workloads. According to Red Hat, the adoption of hosted control planes can result in substantial cost savings, with a potential 30% reduction in infrastructure costs and a 60% reduction in developer time.

In addition, the organization shared its contribution of five new plugins to Backstage, a framework designed for constructing developer portals. These newly added plugins are designed to integrate with technologies like Azure Container Registry, JFrog Artifactory, Kiali, Nexus, and 3scale.

Lastly, Red Hat introduced Ansible Inside, enabling developers to incorporate Ansible Playbooks within their applications. This feature caters to customers seeking to integrate automation into their applications without the need for the full spectrum of capabilities provided by the Ansible Automation Platform.

Backstage is an open source platform for building developer portals. Spotify uses Backstage internally as a home for its development golden paths. Similar to the concept popularized by Netflix, the golden path provides a standardized experience that creates the necessary skeleton of the project. Spotify recently donated Backstage to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The plugins in the commercial package represent some of the most used plugins as well as new plugins created specifically for Backstage users. Individually, the five plugins do many different things, from promoting software quality to managing access control and connecting mentors with mentors. But they all reflect a very Spotify-specific way of working. That’s because they’re built on the same principles that underpin the way we build all our software. Let’s take a closer look at some of those principles.

Spotify’s five plugins for Backstage
You can see different combinations of these principles underlying the new plugins in our suite – both in what they do and how they work.

1. Soundcheck
Performs checks on your software components and shows how well they meet your organization’s engineering standards.

2. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Makes it flexible and easy to control who has access to what in your Backstage instance.

3. Skill sharing
An internal marketplace for on-the-job training opportunities where mentors can connect with mentors, teams can find temporary help (“Wanted: Frontend Web Dev for Two-Week Embed”), programming partners can partner up, and ad hoc teams can come together to work on hacking projects.

4. Pulse
An R&D survey framework-specific to product development-that lets you track key productivity and satisfaction metrics and analyze anonymized response data to discover trends. (Known internally at Spotify as the EngSat Survey.)

5. Insights
Tracks Backstage usage within your organization by capturing and displaying key data points, including daily active Backstage users and most frequently used plugins.

Backstage solves the problems that turn an engineer’s day-to-day life into an obligation rather than a joy, and prevent teams from delivering great software, consistently and quickly, at scale.

According to Backstage Director and General Manager, Austin Lamon, the new suite of five plugins for the developer platform focuses on developer efficiency. The bundle includes Pulse, a productivity and satisfaction survey tool, role-based access control, a no-code access management plugin, and Insights for monitoring Backstage usage across the enterprise.

But those aren’t the only extensions. Skill Exchange also connects talent within the organization, and Soundcheck codifies engineering best practices. Backstage’s main advantage is that it is flexible, extensible and open source, allowing companies to avoid vendor lock-in.

Development teams can use Backstage to build self-service portals to manage assets and unify applications, documents, services and tools into a single UI. It includes a catalog for managing software, including microservices and libraries, templates to spin up new projects, and a catalog of open source plugins.

“Gone are the days when IDEs competed on core features like code creation speed, usability, build automation and more. Тhe competition has moved to adjacent areas — ultimately to foster higher developer velocity. Spotify Backstage shows this with its latest innovations.”

 

Said Holger Mueller, vice president and analyst at Constellation Research.

He also adds that premium plugins Skill Exchange and Soundcheck are key to developer success. The former reflects the ability to work on gigs, while the latter aims to create a productive environment for developers.

Baskѕtаgе is a platform designed to enable companies to build customized “developer portals” that bring together all of their tools, plugins, dаnаgеs, services, APIs and dаnаgеs into a single interface. Through Vaskѕtаgе, users can monitor, for example, Kуberpetеѕ, pоvеpоvе the status of a Сl/CD, view the costs of an оblаgе or follow up on security incidents.