Many decades ago in internet time, in 2019, a group of software engineers from music streaming service Spotify were frustrated with the lack of a good way to manage their software infrastructure. If you know engineers, you will know that they always want to find a better way.
In this case, they wanted a way to make it easier for developers to find and use software they needed, and to keep track of changes to the code, so that they could get on with building things.
They came up with Project Backstage, built on top of open-source technologies, and designed to be extensible and scalable, so that it can be used by teams of any size.
Because it was an open platform, anyone could use it and build on it to help teams produce high-quality code quickly. It is used by numerous companies, from Spotify itself to Google, and has been embraced by open-source software leader Red Hat, which was acquired by IBM five years ago.
“A lot of the big companies were starting to grapple with the same thing: how can we get our developers to become more productive, to deliver software faster, and get products to market quicker?” says Bruce Busansky, hybrid cloud specialist at Red Hat in Johannesburg.
“Red Hat was among those that went looking for the answer. And we discovered Project Backstage. Spotify never sold it. They thought, ‘We've created something really cool here, let's give it back.’ That's how a lot of open-source software is created. It comes from a company that does it to solve a problem, a need, or a challenge, and they give it back to the community. They put it on the internet and everybody can then start to use it as well as contribute to it.
We've created something really cool here, let's give it back
“Red Hat joined the community and started contributing and giving back to Project Backstage. Then we started to realise that a new concept of something called ‘platform engineering’ was coming to the fore.”
Although the term was coined eight years ago, when British software engineer and author Martin Fowler defined it as “the discipline of building and running the infrastructure and tools that enable software development”, it only entered the mainstream in the past year.
Busansky says the core idea around platform engineering is that “it takes away the stuff that was slowing companies down because developers were having to put together their own structure and support it themselves”.
“The communities then built this thing they called the internal developer platform (IDP). The idea was that the first product you have in your business is an IDP and on that you create the products that you sell. So now we create the platform inside your business, and on top of that you create your products.
“As Red Hat, through our contributions to Project Backstage, we've now released version 1 of our platform, called the Red Hat Developer Hub. Effectively, it brings a self-service portal to developers to put together the bits and pieces they need to create software.”
Busasnky is quick to point out that this is not Red Hat’s software, but rather a platform that makes Backstage “enterprise-ready”.
“We've taken what we call the Best of Backstage and we said this is now right for enterprises to consume.”
That also means it is ready to complement another key trend in software development, known as DevOps, which brings together development, operations and security teams to shorten the development life cycle and provide continual delivery of software. But it was never fast enough.
“A lot of the barriers to DevOps was people not being able to deliver what they needed toward the software. Platform engineering is the thing that's going to make it go faster.”
* Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za
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