Intro to IDP
By Sander Aernouts
As a managed services provider we manage a lot of different Azure subscriptions for our customers. For many customers we also bear (partial) responsibility for workloads that run inside their landing zones. Getting an overview of everything we handle is a struggle for our team. We must switch between several customer environments to get insights into security, compliance , and cost, and we need to know which subscriptions belong to which workload to be able to assess whether an individual workload meets the standards we set.
We quickly landed on Backstage as the starting point for our IDP journey doing several proof-of-concepts to check whether Backstage was a fit for our use cases. Backstage is an open-source framework for building IDPs, initially developed internally at Spotify and later donated to the cloud native computing foundation (CNCF). It has three key built-in features for us: software catalog, tech docs, and software templates, and it is very extensible and customizable.
The software catalog is the catalog of all the different components and systems in your IT landscape. For us, the most important entities to have in the catalog are the landing zones we manage, consisting of the hub, and the spokes attached to the hub. The customer workloads we handle usually consists of one or more spokes. We believe that DevOps teams handle all aspects involved in running software production. So, we want to provide our engineers with key data and insights into the workloads we handle. The extensible nature of Backstage allows us to create plugins that integrate with Azure Defender for Cloud to show security and compliance data and Azure Cost Management to show cost data across different Entra ID tenants and Azure subscriptions.
The tech docs feature is a way to gather all documentation, written in markdown, in a single place and make it searchable, whilst keeping the sources in the same repository as the actual code they document. Having all documentation accessible and searchable in one place is extra powerful, we no longer have to switch between different customer environments trying to find the information we need.
Software templates are a tool to help teams get up and running quickly. For example, if you have a certain way of doing ASP.net core API's, you can create a template that has all the required tools and your best practices preconfigured. Teams can then simply apply the template and get all files and configuration added automatically to their repository. We are looking at using software templates, or something similar, to supply automation around standard changes. We already have a lot automated, but things like adding a new spoke to a landing zone can be automated even more, through our IDP, saving our team valuable time and making it easier and more repeatable.
We are only just beginning our own journey and we have ambitious ideas on how to take our managed services to the next level. We also acknowledge that you, our customers, might be facing similar challenges. If you want to know more, do reach out! We are more than happy to share our vision, share our experiences so far, and help you get started on your own IPD journey.
