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Managing microservices has become a necessary but complex undertaking as organizations grow and evolve. While Backstage.io has gained a reputation for facilitating this task, it's not the only game in town. Many teams find themselves pondering Backstage alternatives due to the platform's specific challenges and commitments. In this blog post, we'll explore why you might need a developer portal like Backstage and delve into some alternatives that could be a better fit for your needs.
What Problems Does Backstage Solve?
Why is Backstage.io on so many companies’ radar in the first place? Well, as your organization grows, so do the number and complexity of your services and APIs, each with its own particular set of metadata, monitoring requirements, and deployment pipelines. Backstage.io enables you to build a centralized portal for navigating this intricate landscape, offering an aggregate view of services, infrastructure, documentation, metrics, and more.
But it’s not all sunshine and roses. Despite being extensible and rich in features, Backstage.io is more of a platform rather than an out-of-the-box product. You'll need a dedicated team to set it up, maintain it, and customize it to meet your organization’s needs. Obviously this can be costly and time-consuming, hence why alternatives may be appealing.
Why Consider Backstage Alternatives
While Backstage is a powerful tool for managing developer portals, it does come with certain limitations. One of the primary drawbacks is its complexity in setup and maintenance. Organizations often need to invest substantial time and resources to configure and customize Backstage to fit their unique needs.
Additionally, Backstage's open-source nature means that support is community-driven, which can lead to delays in resolving issues.
Moreover, Backstage may not seamlessly integrate with all tools within an organization's existing stack, requiring custom development workarounds. Its scalability can also be a concern for rapidly growing companies that need a more flexible solution capable of evolving with their needs. Finally, while Backstage offers extensive features, some of these might be overkill for smaller teams, leading to unnecessary overhead.
These limitations highlight the importance of exploring other alternatives that might offer a better fit for specific organizational requirements.
Benefits of Exploring Options
Exploring alternatives to Backstage can yield several benefits for your organization. First and foremost, it allows you to find a tool that better aligns with your specific requirements and existing infrastructure. Different tools offer various feature sets, integrations, and ease of use, which can significantly enhance your productivity and efficiency.
Additionally, by evaluating multiple options, you can identify platforms that offer superior support and scalability, ensuring that your solution can grow alongside your organization. This flexibility is crucial for adapting to changing needs and technological advancements.
Moreover, some alternatives might provide more cost-effective solutions, offering similar or enhanced functionalities at a lower total cost of ownership. This can free up resources for other critical investments within your engineering team.
Ultimately, exploring different tools fosters a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, ensuring that your team is always equipped with the best possible resources to excel in their roles.
Backstage Alternatives
Here, we explore four alternatives to Backstage, each with its pros and cons.
Cloud Provider Tools
Cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure offer native tools to manage your services, such as dashboards, service catalogs, and API listings. For example, AWS Service Catalog gives a generic overview of your services, with API options for further customization and integration.
While handy, these tools lack extendibility, as without integrations, they do not easily allow for the addition or modification of features to suit specific needs! They also tie you to a specific cloud provider, and their utility diminishes in a multi-cloud environment. Finally, they lack intuitive interfaces which makes life harder for non-technical users, providing limited customization options.
Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
If you prefer complete control, a DIY approach using spreadsheets, internal wikis, and homegrown tools may be the way to go. With a DIY solution, you decide what to include, from service listings to metrics and everything in between.
However, the DIY approach has downsides, such as the ongoing cost of ownership and the challenge of scaling as your service ecosystem grows. Teams often underestimate the amount of work involved, which can divert valuable resources from other critical areas.
Rely.io
If you're looking for a specialized solution, Rely.io offers a suite of features that make it a worthy Backstage alternative. Learn more about the specific feature trade-offs between the two here.
Product Catalog
Manage everything from one place with Rely.io’s unified interface, which brings all your services and user journeys. Providing you with easy access to their ownership, dependencies, documentation, deployments, on-call schedules, SLOs, operational maturity and more!
Automated Service Discovery
Say goodbye to manual updates; Rely.io offers automated service discovery to keep your service catalog up to date.
Service Reliability Management
Ensure the robustness of your product without lifting a finger. Rely.io's automated reliability features keep things running smoothly bringing industry best practices to the tip of your fingers. Allowing you to effortlessly track the health of your services, get alerted on both outages and continuous degradation of performance as well as to build beautiful reports to share.
Scorecards and Leaderboards
Drive best practices across your organization by creating scorecards and leaderboards that gamify the adoption of standards like production readiness, DORA metrics, operational maturity and observability coverage. With Rely's seamless integration into your engineering stack, you can view the maturity of each service and team against set standards, to avoid the hassle of manually checking multiple tools.
Developer Homepages
With Rely.io you can create dedicated homepages for each service, resource and team personalizing it to fit their workflow reducing context switching and allowing your engineers to focus on what's important.
Self-service Actions
Improve your engineers autonomy by allowing them to run predefined actions like scaffolding a new resource, provisioning a resource or any day1 and day2 operations directly from the portal.
Get started now!
If you do want to give Rely.io a shot, there’s a comprehensive demo that you can check out right now or if you want to take the plunge you can talk to one of our Platform Architects to get a one-on-one walkthrough through the app and have all your questions answered right away.
See related articles
What are Day 1 and Day 2 Operations for Platform Engineers
How to Implement Developer Self-Service Successfully
The ultimate guide to DORA metrics