By Betty Junod, VMware Tanzu VP Product
Marketing
Technology is ever-evolving and seemingly
evolving more quickly. Over the decades, patterns have repeatedly played out.
New infrastructures and architectures get introduced and become more efficient,
then the software infrastructure (a.k.a. middleware) that supports application
development and integrations follows, helping organizations take advantage of
all those new infrastructures and architectures with the promise of
flexibility, velocity, and portability.
The proliferation of containers enabled and
accelerated new app development patterns like microservices,
12 Factor apps, and other cloud native patterns. But as the industry
focused on distributing infrastructure-from compute and storage to databases
and API routing-the focus on developer experience got lost. Now, advances in
infrastructure and operations, including container orchestration and
networking, infrastructure as code (IaC), as well as platform engineering and
SRE practices, allow us to refocus our efforts on the developer workflow-to
reduce their toil and streamline the path to production.
Organizations recognize that digital
transformation is anchored in the belief that software is a corporate asset
that allows them to compete in dynamic global markets. The ability to realize
new revenue streams, address changing customer needs, and improve security and
efficiency depends on their application development and delivery (AD&D)
strategy. A recent study by Forrester Research, commissioned by
VMware, showed that a better developer experience can affect business strategy,
execution, and is now the responsibility of everyone, including CEOs. See
figure 1.
The
"omnivore's dilemma of software development"
There is no shortage of tools and services
promising to enhance developer productivity and happiness. In the 2021 edition of his Developer Led Landscape report,
Tyler Jewell counted more than 1,000 companies publishing 1,286 products that
were "sold to, purchase-influenced by, or consumed by software developers," the
largest subcategory being Development Platforms, with 420 companies publishing
496 products. In second place was Development Infrastructure, with 352
companies publishing 461. And by the way, their combined ARR exceeds $41 billion.
While it's great to see so much attention
being paid here, it can also be overwhelming. Developers want access to their
preferred tools and focus on their code, while operations teams must meet
company security and compliance requirements.
"We
have at our disposal an enormous bounty, a cornucopia of software delights" -
James Governor, Co-Founder of RedMonk
This "cornucopia of software delights," as
James Governor of RedMonk put it, can often lead to unnecessary developer
toil-the cognitive load it takes to get to the point of writing code: the
process of setting up environments; using the latest and approved APIs, images,
databases, and libraries; fiddling with integrating services; and so on.
Meanwhile, infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams are tasked with
simplifying the path to production, improving the security posture, and
decreasing the number of handoffs between teams, which can be a frustrating
process. These issues are exacerbated at scale, as the number of developers,
apps, and APIs grow.
Have
your cake and eat it too with self-service developer portals
Timely access to the right tools, services,
and technologies fuels innovation. However, app teams often struggle to reap
the benefits, hindered by disparate tools and disjointed workflows that, at
best, increase toil and, at worst, leave systems vulnerable to security
attacks. This is not a novel problem. In fact, I&O teams have long
established service catalogs to help with this issue for infrastructure
services. Today we have a similar model with the internal developer portal, a
central portal to publish all developer services and APIs, making it easy for
developers to browse, search, and consume-enabling rapid innovation, code
reusability, and access to templates, while at the same time enforcing
consistent governance, security, and compliance controls. Developer portals can
marry these often conflicting ideas into a single interface. In other words,
self-service developer portals let us have our cake and eat it too. According
to a Gartner Research® report - Innovation
Insight for Internal Developer Portals "by 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will provide
self-service developer portals to improve developer experience and accelerate
product innovation." The report, featuring Backstage, highlights the
struggle of product teams dealing with disparate tools and disjointed workflows
and that "engineering leaders leading platform teams must establish internal,
self-service developer portals to enable consistency and scale cloud, agile and
DevOps initiatives." [SOURCE: Gartner Research: IInnovation Insight for
Internal Developer Portals; February 2022 - By Manjunath Bhat, Mark O'Neill,
Oleksandr Matvitskyy]
Since its alpha release in 2020, Spotify's Backstage
has gained tremendous traction-and for good reason. An open source platform for
building developer portals, Backstage helps organizations customize an internal
developer portal to improve collaboration, streamline handoffs between teams at
scale, and ensure security and quality standards are met, all while allowing
developers easy access to the tools and services they need. It's why vendors,
including VMware, have chosen to incorporate it into our own products and why end-user organizations ranging from financial
services companies to consumer goods are using Backstage as the foundation of
their developer experience.
No example is more prominent than that of
American
Airlines, which put its aptly named developer portal, Runway, at the
center of its developer experience initiative. Today, Runway is central to the
company's developer experience initiative, with adoption growing to include
thousands of developers.
A vanguard in its industry, American Airlines
recognized the power of software to fuel its digital transformation. As an
early adopter of Cloud Foundry embracing multi-cloud, American Airlines' IT
organization recognized the need to create a centralized developer experience
to enable rapid innovation. One of the most obvious issues holding them back
was a lengthy, manual service request process that often left devs waiting for
months to access the services they need to do their job. This was the opposite
of rapid innovation! Teams took matters into their own hands, trying to address
the same issue in different ways, by building their own portals or using
outside vendors. This resulted in duplication of efforts and inconsistency that
caused fragmentation and is ultimately unsustainable.
A core capability of American Airlines'
developer experience initiative is recognizing approved app patterns and code
reusability. Many enterprises struggle with this, so having a centralized place
for developers to get preconfigured templates with all their app dependencies
and configurations allows them to quickly bootstrap their applications without
having to worry if they're running afoul of security standards and having to
rework their code. With Backstage, American Airlines' Runway offers a flexible,
enterprise-ready portal for integrating developer services and abstracting
infrastructure complexities so developers can focus on writing quality
software. For more, see the American Airlines team in this
video.
Backstage
at KubeCon North America
The community and ecosystem momentum is a
testament to the popularity of Backstage, the technology, and the problems it
solves for its users. The first-ever Backstage Con is took place as a KubeCon
day zero event on October 24 and was full of great talks. Whether you are simply
curious to learn what all the fuss is about or are an advanced end user or
vendor, this is a great opportunity to connect with the community and exchange
ideas.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Betty Junod, VMware Tanzu VP Product
Marketing
Betty Junod is the Vice President of
Product Marketing for VMware Tanzu, the modern applications platform business,
helping organizations along their journey to cloud native. This is Betty's
second time at VMware, having previously led product marketing for End User Computing.
In between her VMware stints, she held marketing leadership positions as
commercial open source companies like Docker and solo.io following the
evolution of technology abstractions from virtualization, containers, to
service mesh. She likes to hang out at the intersection of open source,
distributed systems, and enterprise architecture. @bettyjunod