How To Build A UI For An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) With Port?

A UI is an almost unavoidable component in internal developer platforms (IDP). In the past, the only widely accepted choice was Backstage. Today, we have Port as a (potentially) better choice for the Web UI part of your developer portal.
#port #idp #internaldeveloperplatform #kubernetes
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▬▬▬▬▬▬ ⏱ Timecodes ⏱ ▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 Internal Developer Platform (IDP) Web UIs
07:37 Port Predefined Blueprints And Entities
19:10 Port Custom Blueprints And Entities
36:02 Port Actions, Scorecards, And Pricing
39:27 Port Pros And Cons

[@DevOpsToolkit]

What do you think of Port? Can it rival Backstage?

[@pavelpikat8950]

We are adopting Port as a company IDP in the newly formed Platform Engineering team and we are liking it so far. We have reviewed a couple of other IDPs before settling on Port. The UI is pretty neat. Terraform provider could be improved. And the team behind Port is very enthusiastic

[@DevOpsToolkit]

@@pavelpikat8950 💯, especially for the part about the team. They are great people.

[@BKearal]

@@DevOpsToolkit Being a platform developer myself I am a bit hypocrticial when it comes to my own opinions about third party platforms, especially ones that you build important infrastructure on. If its not open source and its a SaaS solution who tells me it will still be around next year, in two years, in 5 years? There have been other SaaS offerings that basically died out because they were either bought or just didn't bring in enough revenue, in that case I'm out of luck and stranded without a dev portal.

[@satjolk1826]

For sure Port has much nicer UI. For me backstage UI is a little bit outdated. Backstage can be also extended with a custom components. Power of backstage is in the plugins. Based on this year eu kubecon I can say there is a huge hype on backstage. There is a need across organization to organize this microservice chaos. Finally there will be a change in this plugin core and it will be less messy in the future. That should empower backstage even more.

[@robertdeheer3365]

we are using it. it's easy to set up a datamodel.

[@ksqwrd]

This is a very well made video. Especially the first seven minutes where you are walking and manage to get all shots without any other humans in the background, and manage to keep eye contact without running into things (at least in the edited final version). I have to imagine that it took at least a few takes. Excellent production quality. And the content is easy to follow, as always. The community appreciates the effort that you put into these videos. Thanks.

[@johnnie211]

I’m using Port for a while, after I had a long trial on Backstage (and another managed solution) and I must say it made such a huge impact on our internal processes and gave great observation about what is going on in our infra. Another great thing to say is it didn’t take much time to make the integration. The platform is flexible and Port team are super helpful.

[@lukas-pastva]

what a beautiful scenery Viktor!

[@AdrianGoodyer]

Great video and spot on with you pro/con summary. I think a couple of those features have been (at least partially) implemented already which is a good sign as demonstrates they're open to feedback and rapid development. I think the examples could better and in Go instead of Python. I agree YAML should be an option too. Homepages/dashboard - spot on. Some nice visualisations and automatic reporting would be great and also enhanced search. I only added a small number of Blueprints for things like K8s clusters, ArgoCD and GitLab repos and already I was struggling to find things quickly. Overall though - a much better DevUX experience than Backstage and much more maintainable long-term. Some improvements to make, but certainly off to a fantastic start.

[@johndangelo9630]

GREAT DISCUSSION!!

[@andrewnhien9714]

omg. This is really awesome. Thank you again. Please release more data models or awesome blueprints because like you said it want more predefined type of template, a litte bit tough when start. And one more, don't have self-host, sensitive credential, info put on that, is safe? Thank you!

[@TheDoughGetta]

15:20 the cat in the background trying to get out gave me a laugh.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Yeah. If you enter my studio right before I start recording, there's no way out until it's finished.

[@dirien]

I love Port! 😍

[@ogi011]

It would be great to if you could do a video on "proper storage" with Kubernetes not volumes and stuff but actual underlying storage, also networking with a cluster at scale how to ensure namespace separation for apps while providing advanced features such as dpdk and sriov, running this in a larger environment over 20 nodes, challenges and so on.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

One of those will be covered (partly, and in a very different way) next week. Adding the rest to my to-do list.

[@cukiris_]

Nice video. The problem that I see here is the security implications giving third parties a ring to rule them all. Its possible to install it in bare metal with a license? Regards.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I don't think there is the option to self-host it :( That being said, I don't think it's a big deal (as long as you can actually use SaaS) since it's ingesting data that is not (typically) confidential.

[@mzimmerman1988]

Have you made a video about Backstage? I am new to IDP's in general.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I haven't made a video about backstage just yet. It's on my to-do list. It's coming...

[@atlanticd]

How about Rafay? Do you plan to review that as well?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

It's on my to-do list but i cannot yet say when it's coming.

[@fordneild2372]

Why don’t you like JSON? I’m trying to code mod our circleci yamls and the formatting is so inconsistent :( Json is very consistent wrt formatting

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Json is ok, when wrapped inside Cue 🙂

[@playhelper1]

Does Port not support non-work gmail accounts? Cant seem to sign up for an account with my personal Gmail?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I signed up with my private GMail account so I'm guessing it should work with any (unless they made an exception for me).

[@playhelper1]

@@DevOpsToolkit Interesting? Would love to see if other seem to have similar problems. Tried Different browsers (Brave, Chromium, edge) and even different computers and same issue. Comes up with an error "Please login with your work email to start using port"

[@DevOpsToolkit]

They might have changed that since the time I registered. They are very responsive people so I'd suggest pinging them on Slack.

[@playhelper1]

@@DevOpsToolkit Got a Response from the Product Manager. "Signing up from a personal gmail is not possible. Any other non-public domain should work"

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Oh my. I did not know that. That's a silly strategy.

[@rajeshreddyn3080]

What do you think about humanitec ?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

There are certain aspects of Humanitec (not necessarily technical) that prevented me from using it.

[@crikxouba]

​@@DevOpsToolkit such as?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I do not want to badmouth them in public.

[@nchong87]

How about OpsLevel? Have you taken a look at that yet? It's in the same category of tooling as Port

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I wanted to give OpsLevel a go but there is no (obvious) way to try it out without going through the sales motion. I tend to avoid services that do not have a free option or a clear pricing table. I think it's fair to pay for services, but I also think that there should be no obstacles to try that service first.

[@_chalky]

OpsLevel is just hosted backstage, right?

[@christianoestreich3583]

Port seems to do the kube/infra mgmt second to none on the market atm. However the scorecards in OpsLevel are a better experience. You can also run campaigns on improvements. OpsLevel will be launching Infrastructure cataloging soon but that feature seems mostly about seeing dependencies as they relate to services. I suggest you give them both a try if you are in the market for a SaaS IDP.

[@pierreancelot8864]

Hey victor, why 50 minutes? 20 minutes or less could fit my schedule...

[@DevOpsToolkit]

You're right. I went overboard with that one. I'll do my best to keep the upcoming ones within 20 min.

[@pierreancelot8864]

@@DevOpsToolkit thanks. Thanks for all your work, is excellent.

[@dinoscheidt]

Arg, another tool circling around PRs and Services. 😮‍💨 I want proper trunk based development, feature flag, post commit code review and CI/CD service-deployment tooling for my teams 😮‍💨 😮‍💨 😮‍💨

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Port is all about having a customizable UI that represents resources and enables actions related to them. You are still free to do trunk based development or whatever else you might be doing.

[@dinoscheidt]

@@DevOpsToolkit Well currently I‘m doing procrastination. I‘ll write a blue print for that 💪

[@DevOpsToolkit]

@@dinoscheidt Lazy devs (those who procrastinate) are the best ones. They tend to figure out how not to do something (typically through automation) rather than to continue doing the same thing over and over again. So, big thumbs up for procrastination.

[@TankaNafaka]

Filmed in Barcelona? 😎

[@DevOpsToolkit]

It was filmed south of Barcelona in Cqmbrils (an hour drive).

[@robertkozak]

Are you in Barcelona? Maybe I'll hit you up next time im there

[@colleencoll1]

Nice work. Interesting take.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I live in Barcelona so yeah, ping me the next time you're here.