Roadie – a provider of Backstage as a service – recently announced the general availability of its Tech Insights feature, a software-quality tool added to its core offering of managed Spotify Backstage. Tech Insights enables software engineering teams to establish engineering standards and automatically track and report software performance against those standards.
Tech Insights is the first prominent proprietary feature to be offered by Roadie. And using Roadie Tech Insights, organizations can ensure that their software assets have the support and maintenance they need for optimal security, compliance, productivity, agility, and availability. Roadie was launched in 2020 to help organizations adopt and operate Backstage to make developers more effective. The company’s previously unannounced seed funding round of US$3.7 million closed late that year, and it was led by Boldstart Ventures with participation from Firstminute Capital.
Backstage — created by Spotify and now an open-source incubating project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — is used to build internal developer portals. And Roadie Tech Insights provides Scorecards that help software engineering teams keep track of their software assets in the Backstage catalog and ensure they meet predefined quality and compliance targets. The Scorecards are created using Data Sources and Checks defined by the user.
Roadie Tech Insights offers a user interface to build three components:
1.) Data Sources: Data Sources collect facts about services. Tech Insights has built-in Data Sources with pre-defined points that can be used without any setup. Alternatively, users can define their own Data Sources using external APIs or files in a repository.
2.) Checks: A Check is a rule that a service does or does not satisfy. Checks continually test the software in your catalog in an automated way. Users can define their Checks like “Does the software have an SLO set in Datadog?” or “Is the log4j version semantically greater than 2.16.0?” Checks can leverage custom data or data from the APIs of standard SaaS tools the organization already uses, such as PagerDuty, Datadog, and Github. New integrations are easy to build.
3.) Scorecards: Scorecards are collections of multiple Checks, which may come from different Data Sources. Users can target Scorecards to subsets of the software in their catalog. For example, one Scorecard may target Tier 0 and Tier 1 Java services, whereas another may target Python services in the data science organization. Users can create unlimited Scorecards and add them to the Backstage catalog to be visible to team members.
Using Tech Insights, teams are nudged towards improved software quality over time. Tech Insights helps teams:
— Find software that is not meeting expectations and report it to the people who can fix it.
— Build consistent standards in the team and ensure teams are testing and deploying correctly.
— Use prompts and notifications to warn engineers when they are about to make a change that will violate an engineering standard.
— Track and report the progress of migrations.
— Gamify team performance by showing teams how their performance compares to others.
KEY QUOTES:
“Spotify Backstage is a powerful tool but like most open source projects, deploying it yourself becomes a challenge as scale grows. We’ve solved that problem with Roadie, delivering a SaaS offering that not only makes deploying Backstage a snap, but it preserves users’ ability to move back to the pure open source version if they determine that’s the way they need to go. The early product-market fit we’ve found is a great indicator that there’s a strong market for internal developer portals that abstract away the complexity while embracing an open source ethos.”
— David Tuite, CEO at Roadie
“What Roadie has built is remarkable for such an early stage startup. They’ve successfully built something that is resonating with early users and suggests a powerful momentum for a Series Seed venture. Getting in the trenches with Day One companies is exactly where we like to connect with founders, helping them turn great ideas into category-creating iconic companies, and Roadie is a great example of the kind of company whose success we’re energized to support.”
— Ed Sim, founder and general partner at Boldstart Ventures
“SumUp is using Roadie and Tech Insights to promote and track adoption of supply chain security and code analysis tools like Dependabot, CodeQL and others, across all of our production service repositories.”
— Martin Froehlich, vice president of engineering at SumUp
“We’re using Tech Insights to promote and track adoption of security tools with our 250 developers. We’ve created automated checks and scorecards that help us understand which teams have adopted the tools letting us understand how successful our rollout initiative is. We’re excited to expand it to more use cases over the coming months.
— Antony Rinaldi, head of architecture and application platform at Baillie Gifford
