Rafay Systems, the leading platform provider for Kubernetes Management and Operations, introduced Rafay’s Backstage Plugins, a set of open-source software plugins for Backstage, Spotify’s open platform for building internal developer platforms (IDP). These plugins give platform teams the ability to quickly and easily connect the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) to their IDP and power developer self-service workflows including Kubernetes cluster as a service, namespace as a service and environment as a service. By defining and governing developer self-service workflows, platform engineers simplify the developer experience and reduce developer cognitive load.
Developers and Platform Teams Agree: Self-Service is a Must
The demand for developer self-service is rapidly growing. According to the “Understanding Environment Provisioning for Application Development and Deployment” survey, 94% of platform teams and 89% of application developers believe it would be valuable to have a self-service workflow or portal where developers can provision Kubernetes infrastructure, such as a cluster or namespace, themselves. Gartner predicts that 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams by 2026 and that 75% of those will include developer self-service portals.
Consequently, platform engineers are building self-service platforms—using Backstage to build these IDPs—to help developers and operations teams move quickly while staying within company standards and guardrails. However, it remains challenging for platform teams to give and govern access to dedicated and shared Kubernetes clusters and namespaces. As a result of a lack of developer self-service and provisioning capabilities, 1 in 4 organizations take more than 3 months to deploy new applications to production.
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“The key to increasing the speed of modernization initiatives is minimizing the manual, ticketing-based process typically required to provision and access Kubernetes clusters and namespaces,” said Mohan Atreya, SVP of products and services for Rafay Systems. “This means developers do not have to wait for a slow, multi-step ticketing process to get what they need and instead, deploy new applications or resources themselves. By enabling developer self-service for Kubernetes clusters, namespaces and environments through Rafay’s Backstage Plugins, we’re providing a seamless and efficient way for platform teams to govern and manage Kubernetes and environments while giving developers the autonomy they need to move fast and innovate.”
Backstage Plugins Accelerate Developer Velocity and Efficiency via Self-Service Capabilities for Kubernetes
Rafay’s Backstage Plugins enable platform teams to connect Rafay to their IDP to enable one-click cluster, namespace, and environment provisioning and access, delivering the following benefits:
- Battle-tested Backstage-Rafay integration – Platform teams can easily connect their Backstage IDP to Rafay and use all of the Rafay features and functionality via Backstage workflows.
- Developer self-service for Kubernetes – Platform teams can provide a seamless, one-click interface in Backstage for developers to deploy individual namespaces or clusters (called namespace as a service, cluster as a service) based on their application needs. The plugin also gives developers observability into their Kubernetes-based environments in Backstage.
- The ability to define and govern golden path workflows – With Rafay, platform teams can curate which parameters they want to expose and how. This sets enterprise guardrails, simplifies the experience and reduces the cognitive load for developers.
- API extensibility – Another key feature of the Rafay Backstage Plugins is the ability to build a self-service workflow around any functionality that Rafay has to offer, including creating GitOps pipelines or cost management dashboards, surfacing policy violations and more.
“NTT DATA is excited to partner with Rafay and jointly bring a self-service solution for Kubernetes access and environment provisioning to the marketplace,” said Ram Tandukar, tech and capability lead for DevOps at NTT DATA UK&I. “Rafay’s set of Backstage Plugins makes integrating Rafay with a Backstage IDP extremely easy and fast, which is what our clients need to accelerate developer experience and management.”
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