Portals and Platforms, Two Ps in a Pod? How Good Interfaces Make for Good Operability
Talkat Platform Engineering Day NA 2024 · on Tuesday, 2024-11-12· at 10:40· Salt Palace | Level 1 | Grand Ballroom G·
summary
Platforms built on a Backstage portal plus orchestration reduce long-term toil: teams discover vulnerable services via the catalog API, disable a bad Backstage Scaffolder template, then either open PRs for owners or let a platform API push tested upgrades. The real win is adding a three-tier architecture (UI → business API → platform) so the platform can run canary rollouts, codified security patches and CLI automation instead of chasing teams — templates scale fast but go stale unless the platform owns upgrades.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Portals and platforms intro
- 1:05Service setup delays
- 3:11Template adoption struggle
- 4:56Template drift and upgrades
- 6:23Operability beyond uptime
- 7:25Maintainability and patching
- 10:14Portal-only security fixes
- 12:22API layer for operability
- 14:50Usability for adoption
- 16:37Enabling non-platform teams
- 21:30Extensibility and marketplaces
- 22:57Finance control via platform
- 25:29Portals and platforms synergy
- 25:51Conclusion and feedback
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