Why do you need a developers portal in your organization?

In short

Organizations today build products from small units—micro-services/APIs.

The more micro-services and APIs there are, the more difficult it is to navigate and follow them. One of the main reasons for the portal is to document all the organization's APIs with important details about them (status, mock request, CI/CD, costs, etc.), so the tool can be used by developers to know all the services in the organization. It can also save valuable time by providing a general view of the state of the infrastructure and the product, displaying all the components that make up the product and the important details about them.

Additionally to the required visibility, the implementation of the platform engineering approach brings with it another reason for the use of portals and that is the transfer of power to the developers. At the level of automation, making the automations accessible in a central place where all developers work but also at the level of monitoring and control, if developers are responsible for everything, they should also be aware of everything. And if we want to optimize their work and not burden it - an Internal Developers Portal is the exact solution for organizations.

Let's summarize the benefits

• For engineering managers, it allows you to maintain standards and best practices across the organization, and can help you manage your whole tech ecosystem, from migrations to test certification.

• For end users (developers), it makes it fast and simple to build software components in a standardized way, and it provides a central place to manage all projects and documentation.

• For platform engineers, it enables extensibility and scalability by letting you easily integrate new tools and services (via plugins), as well as extending the functionality of existing ones.

• For everyone, it’s a single, consistent experience that ties all your infrastructure tooling, resources, standards, owners, contributors, and administrators together in one place.

(Source: Backstage.io)

Portal tools everywhere…

In the last year, many tools have appeared for building a portal in an organization,

so how do we choose the exact one for us?

If you are looking for an open-source solution which will be free and fully customizable, Backstage.io (by Spotify) is the best choice for you.

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. Powered by a centralized software catalog, Backstage restores order to your microservices and infrastructure and enables your product teams to ship high-quality code quickly — without compromising autonomy.

Backstage unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a streamlined development environment from end to end.

If you are looking for a managed tool, one that will give you a ready portal for your developers with minimum adjustments for usage, here are some:

• Port (Managed Portal)

• OpsLevel (Managed Portal)

• Cortex (Managed Portal)

• Humanitec (Platform)

Comment on the post if you are interested in getting a comparison of those tools and we’ll publish a post about that as well. ✍️