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Liberty Template for Red Hat Developer Hub and Backstage

By Shane ORourke posted Sat October 19, 2024 07:43 AM

  

Intro

In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, reducing cognitive load for developers has become a critical priority. As teams grapple with complex systems, numerous tools, and disparate processes, the risk of developer burnout and decreased productivity increases. Platform Engineering has emerged as a pivotal discipline, streamlining workflows and enhancing developer efficiency. By leveraging open-source solutions like Backstage and Red Hat Developer Hub, organizations can create cohesive environments that centralize resources, simplify access to tools, and foster collaboration. These platforms empower developers by providing intuitive interfaces and comprehensive integrations, ultimately enhancing the overall developer experience and allowing teams to focus on what truly matters—building innovative solutions.

Golden Paths

Golden path templates are essential in Internal Developer Platforms, simplifying the developer experience by offering predefined, best-practice approaches for common tasks and workflows. These templates serve as a framework, enabling developers to quickly set up applications, services, or infrastructure without navigating complex configurations from scratch.

By using golden path templates in platforms like Backstage and Red Hat Developer Hub, organizations ensure consistency across projects and reduce cognitive load, allowing developers to focus on coding rather than memorizing setups. This standardization accelerates onboarding for new team members and minimizes errors, as developers can follow established best practices instead of experimenting with unfamiliar paths.

 
 

Moreover, golden path templates encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing within teams. As developers contribute to and improve these templates, they create a living resource that evolves alongside the technology stack, keeping the organization aligned with the latest advancements. Ultimately, this leads to increased productivity, improved code quality, and a more enjoyable development experience, allowing developers to focus on innovation rather than repetitive, mundane tasks.

Embedding Security

Extending the template to work with Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain, for example, will addresses the need to increase the security of the software supply chain:
  • sign and verify code commits or build artifacts in a “keyless” signing paradigm
  • automatically generate and store SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials) of your containers
  • verify build provenance and Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA).
 
The sample Liberty Template
The Liberty team has released a sample template for Backstage/Red Hat Developer Hub that enables the creation and deployment of the Liberty Starter app on Kubernetes. While this template is functional as-is, Platform Engineers can customize it to fit their specific infrastructure requirements. You can use this template as a foundation to design your own in Backstage/Red Hat Developer Hub.The Liberty template (after taking parameters from Backstage/Red Hat Developer Hub) does the following:
  • Creates a new repo on git containing starter code for application development.
  • Creates a new repo on git containing GitOps configuration for deployment.
  • Sets up a build pipeline using GitHub Actions.
  • Deploys the application code to kubernetes via GitOps.
 
For more details see the Open Liberty repo on GitHub.

New to Platform Engineering ?

If Platform Engineering is new for you, and have more interest in learning about Red Hat Developer Hub, which is an enterprise-grade  supported version of Backstage, try the Red Hat Developer Hub Sandbox on Red Hat Developer.


There is also a free E-Book called 'Developer Portals: Prepare to Perform with Red Hat Developer Hub'. available for download.


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