Helping developers do more in less time has become a priority for organizations. As the ambit of SaaS sprawls ever wider and DevOps grows more popular, companies are discovering that they need to alleviate the cognitive load on developers, who often have to be aware of all the microservices available to them.
While this problem was initially addressed with service catalogs, the category has morphed into something more ambitious: a one-stop shop that lets devs access all the microservices and tools in their ecosystem.
Called internal developer portals, this category is quickly gaining traction at software-heavy companies as they seek to improve their developer experience, and thus, efficiency. According to Forrester, 87% of DevOps leaders agreed that increasing developer productivity is a priority for the next 12 months.
Per Gartner, “these portals enable software engineering leaders to create a versatile ‘app store’ that increases software reuse, improves the developer onboarding experience, streamlines software delivery and facilitates knowledge sharing.”
But these developer portals didn’t come by on their own. Their emergence is closely tied to another trend: the advent of platform engineering.
In a nutshell, platform engineering teams are “groups within typically larger organizations that are given the role of improving the developer experience for other developers in the organization,” Shomik Ghosh, partner at Boldstart Ventures, told TechCrunch+.
Platform engineering teams have become increasingly common in large organizations, as have internal developer portals. Gartner expects that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have a platform team, and by 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will provide self-service developer portals to their engineers.
To better understand why and how internal developer portals came about, let’s go back in time a little.
Going beyond catalogs
Internal developer portals are a key tool for platform engineering teams, but they actually emerged before both concepts had been fully conceived. In fact, they came about in the wake of DevOps: Engineers suddenly found themselves increasingly tasked with deploying and operating the code they write. But in reality — and in production — it was often unclear who owned a given microservice.
What companies knew, then, is that they had a problem: keeping track of and accessing all the microservices in their ecosystem. And they knew it could be solved by something akin to a service catalog.
Spreadsheets were definitely not enough to solve that problem, though. Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex, had this exact problem when he worked at Uber, where the team spent a lot of time “trying to keep track of the 200-300 services they were using in Excel, trying to understand who owned the service, while making sure they were built with security and operational best practices.”
He founded Cortex in 2019 to try and fix that, raising a seed round in May 2021 and a $15 million Series A a few months later to help “development teams wrangle their microservices.”
The space soon saw several companies tackling this problem.
In early 2022, Cortex’s competitor OpsLevel also raised $15 million to help companies organize and track their microservices via a centralized developer portal.
A similar player, Effx, was acquired by Figma in 2021 after the former raised a seed round to “give developers better insights into their microservice architectures.”
Cortex and OpsLevel today focus on the enterprise. Similarly, Atlassian’s Compass seems cut out for the needs of large enterprises.
Things were developing at a smooth pace for a while, until an in-house project at Spotify changed the game: Backstage.
Gateways for organizing chaos
Backstage isn’t an internal developer portal in itself, but rather “an open platform for building developer portals.”
As such, it can bring order to companies’ infrastructure by letting them build customized developer portals, combining all their tooling, apps, data, services, APIs and documents in a single interface. Through Backstage, users can monitor Kubernetes, for example, check their CI/CD status, view cloud costs or track security incidents.
The platform started out in 2016 as an in-house project at Spotify, but after the Swedish company open sourced it in 2020, it is now used well beyond what it was originally intended for.
According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where Backstage is now an incubating project, the platform is used by 100 publicly listed adopting companies such as American Airlines, Expedia Group, HelloFresh, Netflix, Peloton, Roku, Splunk, Wayfair and Zalando. “It also has a thriving open source community of over 500 developers submitting PRs, adding new features, and building plugins,” the CNCF website says.
Spotify’s decision to make Backstage open source was one way it could boost the project’s resiliency, as did its effort to monetize it. The company had learned its lesson in the container orchestration space when it ended up painfully swapping its home-grown project, Helios, for the much more successful Kubernetes.
With Backstage now being widely embraced by large organizations and thriving as an open source project, it is less likely to go the way of the dodo. But it does have competitors. One of those is Port, a proprietary solution with roots in the Israeli army’s Unit 8200.
Before launching Port, its co-founders Zohar Einy and Yonatan Boguslavski were involved in the creation of an in-house large-scale developer portal for the Israel Defense Forces. After their army service ended, they decided to launch something similar for the broader public that applied some of the lessons they had learned from their first iteration.
“When we thought about Port and designing it once again as more of a cloud-native oriented solution, we kept a couple of things in mind that make us different from Backstage and other solutions,” Einy said.
These differences are based on two principles: simplicity and flexibility. With a no-code approach relying on building blocks, Port is like “a website builder, but for DevOps and the platform,” Einy said. “We give [platform teams] a very simple toolset that they can use to build the house that they want for their organization.”
Keeping up with the construction analogy, Port came up with the concept of blueprints. According to its documentation, “a blueprint is the generic building block in Port. It represents assets that can be managed in Port, such as microservices, environments, packages, clusters, databases and more.”
Neither Port nor Backstage can accurately be described as service catalogs. While that is part of what these products do, they also list a wider range of elements, enabling companies to build self-serve actions that developers can perform.
At Roadie, a startup that offers a SaaS version of Backstage, product presentation is split in two: catalog and scaffolder. In Backstage’s terminology, the latter lets developers create apps, request infrastructure and adopt internal practices through templates. “It’s the scaffolder that adds value, much more than the catalog,” Roadie’s developer relations manager, Jorge Lainfiesta, told TechCrunch+.
Choosing portals
So now that you understand what a developer portal is, you should know if your organization needs one.
If you do, building a solution in-house like Spotify did isn’t really an option. “At the beginning, we saw it a little bit, but today the market education is [such] that no one talks about building an in-house solution; everyone realized that they need to either buy, or build with Backstage,” Einy said.
A company’s size plays a role in this decision, obviously. The answer to which developer portal solution is more customizable depends on whom you ask, but everyone we spoke with agreed that Backstage is fairly onerous to expand and maintain.
While Port’s simplicity and freemium model may be alluring to some companies that want to get started quickly, Backstage scores a major point for being open source, which means vendor lock-in is not a risk.
As for Roadie, it is focused on scaleups interested in a hosted version of Backstage with support and a community. With automatic upgrades, Roadie also ensures platform engineers can keep up with the constant stream of critical pull requests and new features typical of a vibrant open source project.
Regardless of the option they choose, companies must be aware that developer portals are not turnkey solutions, Gartner warns. These portals “must be configured and integrated with existing tools and systems to be useful and effective.”
Once properly configured, however, developer portals deliver on the promise summed up by Backstage: to enable product teams to ship high-quality code quickly — without compromising autonomy.
This likely explains why this category is currently enjoying tailwinds that may soon be spurred by the wider adoption of artificial intelligence in engineering workflows.