How Backstage Uses Uffizzi

Spotify's Backstage team has boosted its development velocity by 20% in just two months by adopting Uffizzi ephemeral environments to streamline their pull request review process. Backstage, an open-source developer portal framework, has experienced rapid growth, with over 500 companies and more than 1 million developers using it. However, the increasing number of contributions and pull requests created a need for more efficient acceptance testing.

Ephemeral environments, which are temporary dev, test, or staging environments resembling production, were introduced to help streamline testing. These environments are created on-demand for feature branches and are then deleted when no longer needed. They enable contributors to confirm functionality and allow maintainers to preview changes, improving efficiency and saving time.

Challenges

Backstage faced several challenges that led to the adoption of Uffizzi:

1. Growing Contribution Volume: With an exploding community of contributors, Backstage was dealing with hundreds of pull requests each month. This massive volume required an efficient system to manage and test these contributions.

2. Development Velocity: The need to improve development velocity was paramount. They needed to streamline the process for reviewing and accepting git contributions to maintain their pace of innovation.

3. Efficiency in Acceptance Testing: Before Uffizzi, the process of testing contributions was likely slower and more cumbersome, possibly involving conflicts in a shared staging environment.

4. Infrastructure Scalability: The existing system could not scale effectively to support the demand for concurrent ephemeral environments required for the volume of active pull requests.

5. User Experience: There was a need for a better user experience, especially for the vast number of external contributors.

6. Cost Management: The cost implications of maintaining a static host cluster for each contribution were prohibitive, and the previous solution had escalating costs and issues with storage.

7. Security and Access Control: Given the open-source nature of Backstage and the number of external contributors, robust security and access control mechanisms were needed.

8. Integration with Existing Workflows: It was important to have a solution that worked seamlessly with their existing GitHub Actions workflows.

Solution

Uffizzi offered solutions to these challenges:

• Scalability: Built on Kubernetes, it could handle the required number of ephemeral environments concurrently.
• Automation: It automated the creation, updating, and deletion of environments, requiring no manual steps.
• Isolated Testing: Provided isolated environments for feature branches, preventing conflicts from other branches.
• Shareability: Generated URLs for each ephemeral environment that could be accessed easily from pull requests, improving collaboration.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Being ephemeral, the environments were deleted after use, avoiding the cost of maintaining persistent environments.
• Access Control: Implemented secure access for external contributors without compromising sensitive information.
• Lifecycle Management: Managed build artifacts efficiently, addressing the issue of registry storage for temporary artifacts.

Results

By addressing the technical and logistical challenges with Uffizzi, Backstage was able to pack more features into every release, increase the merges per week by 20%, with more efficient pull request reviews, faster iterations, fewer bugs, and significant time savings. It also enhanced the overall development process for its maintainers and contributors.

Ephemeral environments also save money by avoiding the need for a static host cluster for every contributor. They are "short-lived" and cost-effective, especially for testing in isolation and faster iterations, and support hundreds of simultaneous pull requests.

Uffizzi integrated seamlessly with Backstage's workflow, providing automated, isolated, shareable, and scalable environments. Outside contributors gained secure access to ephemeral environments, and build artifacts were efficiently managed, reducing storage requirements.