We used the popular open source Backstage project on Kubernetes for IDPs and customized it by adding frontend and backend functionality, implementing a secrets management strategy, integrating code repositories, and setting up deployment pipelines for managed Kubernetes clusters.

We placed great emphasis on best practices for authentication, security, upgrades, and maintenance, in addition to establishing a contribution model for plugins and API integrations. This allows the automotive company’s development teams to extend the benefits of Backstage within their organization.

Advantages

• For engineering managers, the platform enables standards and best practices to be maintained across the organization and can help manage the entire technology ecosystem, from migrations to test certification.
• For developers, the platform facilitates the quick and easy creation of software components in a standardized way and provides a central place to manage all projects and documentation.
• For infrastructure engineers, the platform allows them to easily create and deploy managed infrastructure, such as Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines and databases that meet the organization’s security standards, reducing development startup times from months to minutes.
• For platform engineers, the platform enables high extensibility and scalability through the easy integration of new tools and services (via plugins) and the extension of the functionality of existing services.

For everyone, the platform provides a unified experience that brings together all infrastructure tools, resources, standards, owners, contributors and administrators in one place.

Architecture overview

The platform’s system includes several services that work together to facilitate the creation of software components and the declarative deployment of infrastructure.

Backstage

Backstage serves as the main interface and allows users to create software components from templates via a web browser. It consists of a React-based frontend and an Express.js-based backend API. Backstage’s modular architecture allows for easy expansion through community-contributed or internally developed plugins.

ArgoCD

ArgoCD is used in the platform for GitOps-based deployment workflows in Kubernetes. It synchronizes YAML manifests from a Git repository with a Kubernetes cluster, maintaining consistency between the desired and actual state of the cluster.

Crossplane

Crossplane, a Kubernetes Control Plane, extends the Kubernetes API to manage external infrastructure resources in providers such as Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. It uses the Kubernetes reconciliation loop to continuously update the state of provisioned resources based on the defined manifests.