Commercial Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) are a valuable investment for teams that want to move quickly toward addressing initiatives surrounding software ownership, production readiness, and improving developer experience. But there's a common misconception that all commercial internal developer portals (IDPs) carry an inherent risk of “vendor lock-in” vs open-source alternatives like Backstage.

Metrics provide visibility into engineering operations, allowing teams to iteratively improve. By tracking key data points like deployment frequency, lead time, server uptime, and change fail rate over time, organizations can spot trends, compare against benchmarks, and address process inefficiencies.

Internal Developer Portals and platforms do a lot—they're an all-in-one system of record, lever for defining and driving best practice, and vehicle for creating new software components. It's not hard to understand why undertaking such a project can be labor and resource intensive. But it doesn't necessarily have to be.

There is nothing more valuable to an organization than data—about customers, products, opportunities, gaps... the list goes on. We know that to maximize value streams for the business we need to turn a critical eye to data related to how each group operates, including software development teams. In 2019 a group known as the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team set out to find a universally applicable framework for doing just that.

Backstage by Spotify is an open-source platform for building IDPs (internal developer portals). IDPs provide standardization and visibility for engineering teams and managers, as the single source of truth for status, ownership, and metrics on software projects. Teams often try Backstage when they have aspirations of “building anything and everything,” but run into problems when supporting “anything and everything” becomes a full-time job for multiple front and back-end engineers.

In modern engineering teams, lack of comprehensive data visibility can be a major problem. Without full insights into workflows, projects, and processes, issues can arise that create bottlenecks, increase costs, and hamper team productivity. Organizations have long measured company and business metrics, but now leaders want to understand how the engineering teams work from a data- and metrics-oriented approach.

Lumigo is excited to announce its microservice troubleshooting platform now provides developers and DevOps with the power of OpenTelemetry (OTel) with a single click. Lumigo has long been the leading troubleshooting platform for serverless, but now, users can harness its best-in-class debugging and observability platform for all microservices-based environments.

As many VMware customers have found in recent years, cloud native microservice-based applications improve IT operations efficiency and security along with developer speed and productivity. When data is at the heart of those mission-critical applications, VMware Tanzu Data Services, a portfolio of popular enterprise-grade cloud native data solutions for data in motion and at rest, can help.

With the rise of cloud computing, containerization, and microservices architecture, developers are adopting new approaches to building and deploying applications that are more scalable and resilient. Microservices architecture, in particular, has gained significant popularity due to its ability to break down monolithic applications into smaller, independent services.

Reporting from multiple engineering systems is crucial for maintaining the high velocity and quality standards required in today’s tech industry. However, creating reports can be challenging due to the need for deep technical expertise and aggregation of many separate systems worth of data.