DEVOPSdigest

Rafay Systems 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.

“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."

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.

Rafay Backstage Plugins will be available to customers globally by July 2023.