Backstage Introduction, KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2022

Thanks to TeraSky’s education program, I recently attended KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain.

The experience was incredible. While there were many interesting technical sessions on many exciting topics, I was most curious about Backstage - which has sparked my interest ever since I started exploring VMware Tanzu Application Platform (TAP).

I decided to attend a session entitled “Backstage: Restoring Order to Your Chaos”, given by Spotify software engineer Dave Zolotusky. Going into the session, I was stunned by the huge line of people trying to get into the room. That was something I had never seen before in any other session. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to secure one of the last seats.

Production-Grade Multi-Cluster TAP Installation Guide

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• Prepare your Workstation
• Relocate TAP Images to your Private Registry
• Install TAP
  • View Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Issue a TLS Certificate for TAP GUI
    • Set up a Database for TAP GUI
    • Set up the TAP GUI Catalog Git Repository
    • Set up RBAC for the Metadata Store
    • Set up an Authentication Provider for TAP GUI
    • Set up RBAC for the Build, Run and Iterate Clusters
    • Set an Ingress Domain, TAP GUI Hostname and CA Certificate
    • Deploy the TAP Package
  • Build Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Set up Metadata Store Authentication and CA Certificate
    • Prepare a Sample Source Code Git Repository
    • Update the TAP Values File
    • Deploy the TAP Package
    • Deploy the TBS Full Dependencies Package
    • Set up the Developer Namespace and Deploy a Workload
  • Run Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Update the TAP Values File
    • Deploy the TAP Package
    • Set up the Developer Namespace and Deploy a Workload
  • Iterate Cluster
    • Set up the Installation Namespace
    • Update the TAP Values File
    • Deploy the TAP Package
    • Deploy the TBS Full Dependencies Package
    • Set up the Developer Namespace and Deploy a Workload
    • Iterate on your Application
• Wrap Up

Introduction

Since my previous posts on TAP Overview and Backstage, I have been diving deeper into TAP, trying to establish the practices around it.

VMware Tanzu Application Platform Overview

In the first part of this series, I described what Backstage is and some of the advantages it aims to solve. VMware uses Backstage to enable its Tanzu Application Platform (TAP). Before we can understand how, however, we need to understand what TAP is and what it aims to do.

So, what exactly is the Tanzu Application Platform?

TAP is a robust application development platform entirely focused on the developer experience. It provides a rich set of developer tools in a centralized user interface. It is the latest innovation in this space from VMware. It is a true game-changer, building upon community-adopted tooling and the existing products within the Tanzu Advanced Suite to offer a next-gen PaaS solution that aims to solve the same challenges the traditional PaaS systems solve, as well as the issues they introduced.