Red Hat, Inc., the global provider of open source solutions, has announced Red Hat Developer Hub, a enterprise-grade, unified and open portal designed to streamline the development process through a supported and opinionated framework.
Crafted from the CNCF incubating open source project Backstage, the Red Hat Developer Hub platform provides the necessary, curated tools and resources developers need to create higher-quality applications, maximizing existing skills and accelerating velocity while reducing friction and cognitive overload.
A consistent enterprise developer experience
Internal developer platforms have emerged as a key solution in navigating the sprawl that DevOps teams often face. These platforms help to increase developer productivity while reducing the volume of optional tools and information that must be sifted through to actually deliver production code. According to industry analyst firm, IDC, “60% of organizations looking to scale DevOps will adopt an internal developer platform to provide infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and other internal services to enable developer self-service by 2025.”
While the need is clear, building and maintaining an internal developer portal remains complex. This is especially true at the scale of modern enterprises, with heterogeneous tools, ever-changing security needs and compliance requirements that vary across industries and regions. Providing Red Hat’s opinionated, supported and optimized version of Backstage, Red Hat Developer Hub intends to deliver improved developer experiences across environments, including Kubernetes and container application platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift.
The Red Hat Developer Hub aims to mitigate the challenges inherent to delivering and maintaining developer portals with:
A single pane of glass to view all available developer tools and resources to increase productivity.
Self-service capabilities, along with guardrails, for cloud-native application development that complies with enterprise-wide best practices
Ensures proper security and governance for all developers across the enterprise
Red Hat Developer Hub also helps to limit choice paralysis by enabling a developer experience that offers a clear, straightforward set of internal approved and curated tools, languages and other developer resources in a self-managed and supported portal. This helps to further maximize application velocity and code quality without sacrificing innovation.
Additionally, Red Hat Developer Hub includes a set of pre-defined, pre-architected and supported templates for accelerating application development. These Golden Path templates simplify the process of getting applications into production more quickly and securely without cutting crucial workflow steps.
Red Hat Plug-ins for Backstage
Red Hat has also developed Red Hat Plug-ins for Backstage, a bundle of six plugins that integrate various key systems into Backstage, helping to extend the project’s functionality. This contributes to a more consistent experience for Backstage users without compromising workflow efficiency or speed. The plugins can be used across all Backstage installations, providing even more flexibility for developers across platforms and Kubernetes distributions and include:
Application Topology for Kubernetes, which enables developers to visualize real time status of application and infrastructure workloads deployed to any Kubernetes target, including Red Hat OpenShift, with greater consistency.
Multi Cluster View with Open Cluster Manager (OCM), which provides a view into clusters from Open Cluster Manager’s MultiClusterHub and MultiCluster Engine in Backstage.
Container Image Registry for Quay, which improves the integration and speed of interactions with Quay registries by providing a view into container image details. This includes security vulnerabilities (CVEs) associated with deployed images.
Pipelines with Tekton, which gives users a view into the details of all Tekton pipeline runs and their respective status across all services.
Authentication and Authorization with Keycloak, which enables platform engineers to load users and groups from Keycloak into Backstage, allowing the use of multiple authentication providers to be applied to Backstage entities.
GitOps with Argo CD, which helps track the health and status of the Argo CD status for services within Backstage.
Red Hat plans to continue to enhance the Red Hat Developer Hub platform with additional plugins to support a wider set of tools and systems in future releases.
Availability
The Red Hat Backstage Plug-ins are generally available in the second half of this year along with the Developer Preview of Red Hat Developer Hub. For a view into the platform and to test drive features today, interested users can access the upstream project Janus.
Mithun Dhar, vice president and general manager, Developer Tools and Programs, Red Hat, said, “Organizations need to scale software development and delivery and have little time to do so. Developed from the upstream framework, Backstage, and open source project Janus, Red Hat Developer Hub is an open portal that takes the best tools, templates, and plugins and creates a streamlined environment that novice and seasoned developers alike will benefit from. A unified platform not only leads to greater productivity, but also fosters internal collaboration, creating a culture of innovation that allows developers to thrive.”
Al Gillen, group VP, Software Development and Open Source, IDC, said, “The high demand for software development, further expanded by the pandemic, has put substantial stress on developers that already were in short supply. With the additional fact that organizations typically spend a substantial portion of resources (often as much as two-thirds of time and money) on maintaining existing solutions, it becomes obvious why the industry must move to add artificial intelligence, automation, and discoverability to development activities, including the time consuming but critical activity of modernizing existing applications. Red Hat Developer Hub, based on the OSS project Backstage, streamlines and centralizes key technologies for developers, enabling them to focus on delivering quality applications at speed. Given the affinity that developers have for OSS projects, it is not surprising that developers are embracing these new OSS developer tools.”
