Infosys Ltd. Client

Boosting Developer Efficiency with Backstage.io

Challenge

How Infosys increased developer productivity and improved standardization of technology and collaboration with Backstage.io for a North American automotive manufacturing customer.

Having over 1,600 cloud applications supporting its operations and more than 100 application teams, the company wanted to simplify and standardize the development of applications – a one stop shop solution for all development needs with standards, industry best practices, security implementations, and compliance.

Another key driver was time to market, to build quickly and easily adhering to best practices with simplified and streamlined processes. Another focus area was unification across the board in terms of tooling, observability, assessments (accreditations), and customized/ templated cost visibility for each application. It was not enough to focus just on the infrastructure provisioning but also to create an intuitive developer tool to help with technical documentation, strategies for cloud migration, and legacy modernization while also being reusable.

Solution

After multiple design workshops with all concerned stake holders (ranging from business owners to enterprise architects), the concepts of such a platform and its distinctive capabilities was fostered and designed. These workshops – combined with UX brainstorming – helped create an MVP for the product in terms of its capabilities.

User personas included developers, architects and support personnel, as well as SREs, and the UX reflected their input.

Open source first was critical. Being pioneers in leveraging and advocating in house development and open-source adoption, the Backstage framework was zeroed in on as having the best fit with its plug and play modules ideal for advanced cloud engineering requirements. A seamless back door to absorb and evolve with the Backstage community – for any core framework updates, improvements, and new releases – was also considered and designed for sustainable future growth.

Hosting considerations were also important. A monolith hosting different plugins with mono-repos, on-premise connectivity considerations, ease of access across the board, and scalability needs were key design considerations on the AWS cloud. Infrastructure provisioning including reusable templates, blueprints, and implementation patterns using terraform and Terragrunt were developed with industry best practices and built-in security guardrails.

The Amazon OpenSearch implementation using off-the-shelf search component provided by Backstage included the integrated TechDocs feature. Developers write their documentation in markdown files in their code and with little configuration get a nice-looking technical documentation site in Backstage.

There were also a number of important new additions including: the Service Now integration, critical features like the Security Dashboard (with the Integrated view for Managers/ Developers to review security violations and ensure compliance to customer security standards for remediation), the Cloud Spend Dashboard (with the Consolidated Cost view for Managers based on the Account Subscriptions), the Developer Dashboard (for Project health, PQM parameters with Monitoring capabilities) and the Global Site Search features(for easy site navigation and integrated with Techdocs) along with the Feature toggle functionalities to provide relevant content to the logged in user based on selected features.

Finally, it was key to have insights into Chofer (the code name for platform), meaning there needed to be an observability solution. Using Datadog as a plugin provided comprehensive monitoring capabilities. It offers real-time visibility into the health and performance of the cluster, including metrics, logs, and traces to gain insights into resource utilization, application performance, and even container orchestration. This enables proactive troubleshooting, efficient resource allocation, and effective capacity planning, ensuring the smooth operation of cloud environment and facilitating application scalability and stability.

Key Use Cases

Scaffolding & blueprint execution

Tech Stack Used for Solution

Solution Architecture

Impact

The project has been a success by a variety of measures.

No more unstructured, ad-hoc repetitive development activities, infrastructure development and provisioning.

To date there has been a cost savings of roughly $5 million USD per year for customers (from existing customer testimony, so far around $20 million USD and more has been saved). The company has also seen a reduction of around $5 million in annual cloud infrastructure costs, or up to $96,000 in infrastructure costs per team. Furthermore, customers can track its go-green initiatives by using Chofer’s Cloud Carbon Footprint tool, which shows the various customer teams’ carbon footprints, their cloud spends, and their cost optimization recommendations.

Thanks to the new solution, there is now a considerable enterprise-wide reusable configurable inventory: 40+ Blueprints, 375+ App Catalogs, 35+ Training content.

Teams have seen a 90% improvement in the onboarding process – from 5-7 days reduced to 2-3 hours.

One team saved a full six weeks of effort, equivalent to $250k USD.

It unifies all the infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation with a single, consistent UI. Imagine if all the tools, AWS, Terraform, blueprints, CI pipelines, Docker, and whatever else is hiding in the stack, all had the same, easy-to-use interface. 

This solution provides a secure, standardized, and unified approach to common goals like infrastructure provisioning, documentations, training, onboarding, and insights.