Backstage + Coder: The Full Software Development Lifecycle Webinar Recap

on April 12th, 2024

Updated on October 4th, 2024

3 min read

We recently hosted a webinar exploring some recent movements in internal developer platforms (IDPs) and cloud development environments (CDEs). Our Head of Product, Ben Potter, demo’d the Coder Backstage Plugin to show how enterprises can improve developer experience while managing the complexity of the typical enterprise development environment.

Here’s what Ben covered:

The complexity of modern development projects
How Backstage unifies all the items in a project
How Coder simplifies environment configuration and provisioning
How Coder and Backstage complement each other

Development projects are complex

Developers in enterprise organizations wrangle a long list of services, APIs, and documentation for things like authentication, CI/CD, debugging, testing, orchestration, and so on. Keeping track of all these items in a project consumes a lot of developer time. Trying to use them effectively and consistently makes a developer’s life even harder.

Unify with Backstage

In the webinar, Ben gives an overview of Backstage, an internal developer platform. It provides organizations with a developer portal, which is a centralized knowledge hub for distraction-free, streamlined workflow.

Backstage’s extensive plugin ecosystem lets organizations unify all of a project’s parts in a service catalog. This lightens the cognitive load on developers, giving them quick access to relevant resources.

Now add Coder

With Backstage’s unified service catalog, developers need a way to manage development environments. Coder does exactly this. Ben explains how Coder abstracts the complexities of securely and efficiently configuring and provisioning cloud development environments. Developers can start coding at the literal click of a button.

With a single source of truth for configuration, Coder lets organizations eliminate the discrepancies between development and production environments. And Coder's built-in security lets organizations protect sensitive code and data in the cloud-centric development landscape.

Backstage + Coder

In the webinar, you’ll see a practical example of how a couple of plugins from Coder bridge the gap between configuring their development environments and the coding process itself. Backstage and Coder bring cohesiveness to software development workflows, for an efficient approach to managing the software lifecycle. They lay a smooth path from project initiation to code development.

Developers can use Backstage to access project-related information and resources. Then Coder ensures that their development environment is consistent, secure, and tailored to the project's needs. This lets developers focus more on development and less on the logistical challenges that hinder the development process.

Learn more

If you want to dive deeper into using Coder’s Backstage Plugin, click here to register and watch the full webinar.

Also, you can learn more about the Coder Backstage Plugin itself.