backstage VS Installation

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.

"The site" is actually just their blog. The github repo at https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox is more like the real homepage and has a good presentation.

Sweet! If it ends up anything like Netbox it will be so sweet. By looking at the screenshots I am very excited to see this implemented!

NetBox Release v3.6.6 is now live (as of November 29, 2023)!

Take a look at netbox. https://netbox.dev/

Pre-trained systems dominate AI today (as deep as the P in GPT). My team and I have been researching and building alternatives given how the hallucination, blackbox and other problems don't seem solvable within* the current paradigm.

One of our first applications is a network automation solution for Netbox-- locally trained AI Agents unique to each Netbox account to predict roles of newly added devices given the current local list of devices, like a context-aware autocomplete.

Agents are lightweight by design, this particular Netbox Agent is 40-neuron, and when hooked up demo.netbox.dev and consistently gets 80%+ accuracy predicting device roles even when trained on ~60 devices only.

Try it out: https://aolabs-netbox.streamlit.app/

You can use dummy data from demo.netbox.dev. More on Netbox: https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

We'd keen for feedback, if this is useful, how we could extend it if it is, or if it sparks other application ideas.

* Somebody has to be the pre-trainer, leaving an irreducible gap of misunderstanding between AI and its application which we are trying to diminish by adding a layer of local training.

Before upgrading, please: 1. Verify in release notes changelog if any new breaking changes might affect you. You can also review the NetBox Issues on GitHub to see if any new issues have arisen that might affect you. 2. Next, refer to the Upgrading to a new NetBox Release guide for steps to upgrade your instance.

I've been looking into some projects for some opensource software i use and noticed a few of them have empty __init__.py files (for example https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/blob/develop/netbox/core/__init__.py)

IT wise, It's been a fair few years since I've been in a department that does asset management, we used to use GLPI with it's warts and all, which got replace with https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox