Red Hat comes up with Developer Hub to encourage developer productivity

Red Hat announced Developer Hub, an enterprise-grade, unified and open portal designed to streamline the development process through a supported and opinionated framework. Crafted from the open source project Backstage, the Developer Hub platform provides the necessary curated tools and resources developers need to create higher-quality applications, maximizing existing skills and accelerating velocity while reducing friction and cognitive overload.

A more consistent enterprise developer experience 

Internal developer platforms have emerged as a key solution in navigating the sprawl that DevOps teams often face. These platforms help increase developer productivity while reducing the volume of optional tools and information that must be sifted through to deliver production code. According to industry analyst firm, IDC, “60% of organizations looking to scale DevOps will adopt an internal developer platform to provide infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and other internal services to enable developer self-service by 2025.”  

While the need is clear, building and maintaining an internal developer portal remains complex. This is especially true at the scale of modern enterprises, with heterogeneous tools, ever-changing security needs, and compliance requirements that vary across industries and regions. As the first standalone enterprise-grade offering based on Backstage, Red Hat Developer Hub intends to deliver improved developer experiences across environments, including Kubernetes and container application platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift.

The Red Hat Developer Hub aims to mitigate the challenges inherent to delivering and maintaining developer portals with: 

A single pane of glass to view all available developer tools and resources to increase productivity; 

Self-service capabilities, along with guardrails, for cloud-native application development that complies with enterprise-wide best practices; and 

Proper security and governance for all developers across the enterprise. 

Red Hat Developer Hub also helps to limit choice paralysis by enabling a developer experience that offers a clear, straightforward set of approved and curated tools, languages and other developer resources in a self-managed and supported portal. This experience helps to further maximize application velocity and code quality without sacrificing innovation.

Additionally, Red Hat Developer Hub includes a set of pre-defined, pre-architected and supported templates for accelerating application development. These Golden Path templates simplify the process of getting applications into production more quickly and securely without cutting crucial workflow steps. 

Red Hat Plug-ins for Backstage 

Red Hat has also developed Red Hat Plug-ins for Backstage, a bundle of six plug-ins that integrate various key systems into Backstage, helping to extend the project’s functionality. The plug-ins can be used across all Backstage installations, providing even more flexibility for developers across platforms and Kubernetes distributions and include:

Application Topology for Kubernetes, which enables developers to visualize real-time status of application and infrastructure workloads deployed to any Kubernetes target, including Red Hat OpenShift, with greater consistency. 

Multicluster View with Open Cluster Manager (OCM), which provides a view into clusters from Open Cluster Manager’s MulticlusterHub and Multicluster Engine in Backstage.  

Container Image Registry for Quay, which improves the integration and speed of interactions with Quay registries by providing a view into container image details. This includes security vulnerabilities (CVEs) associated with deployed images. 

Pipelines with Tekton, which gives users a view into the details of all Tekton pipeline runs and their respective status across all services. 

Authentication and Authorization with Keycloak, which enables platform engineers to load users and groups from Keycloak into Backstage 

GitOps with Argo CD, which helps track the health and status of the Argo CD status for services within Backstage. 

Red Hat plans to continue to enhance the Red Hat Developer Hub platform with additional plug-ins to support a broader set of tools and systems in future releases.

Availability 

The Red Hat Backstage Plug-ins are generally available in the second half of this year with the Developer Preview of Red Hat Developer Hub.