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Future of the Janus IDP community

· 2 min read
Bethany Griggs
Bethany Griggs
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat Inc.

We wanted to update the Janus community around the current state of the project, and how our involvement with the upstream Backstage community will impact the Janus community moving forward.

The original intent of the Janus project was to provide a community where Red Hat could collaborate with other teams, customers, partners and interested parties to advance and evolve the Backstage upstream project. Through the Janus community, the project has successfully contributed to a number of key initiatives in the upstream project, such as dynamic plugin support, the upstream Helm chart, and the contribution of a number of plugins. Additionally, we are now an active partner in the Backstage Community Plugins SIG.

The Janus community has made impactful contributions which have shaped the wider platform. Based on this success, we now see a path forward where much of our efforts can be consolidated with the upstream. This may however render aspects of the Janus project redundant or unnecessary. We anticipate no loss of content or features from the Janus project, but we do expect content to gradually move to new locations, and we will endeavor to keep our community and users updated as to when and where the content has moved:

The Digital Experience Platform (DXP) Adoption Journey with Red Hat Developer Hub - Part 1

· 4 min read
Rigin Oommen
Rigin Oommen
Senior Software Engineer, DXP, Red Hat Inc.
Mayur Deshmukh
Mayur Deshmukh
Senior Software Engineer, DXP, Red Hat Inc.
Nilesh Patil
Nilesh Patil
Senior Manager, DXP, Red Hat Inc.
As of July 1, 2024, all Janus IDP blogs have been archived and will no longer be updated. Some information in these posts may be outdated and may not work as described.

The Digital Experience Platform (DXP) team which is part of Red Hat Global Engineering started their journey a year before with a community version of backstage. The Digital Experience portfolio includes more than 200 services and applications, many of which are of high and critical business importance and require a robust catalog that can give us insights into the services. The Backstage Service Catalog was a close match and provided a framework for further customization.

The Community version of the backstage gave us a good start, however it required dedicated time and effort to discover, configure, customize and maintain the instance. It was a time-consuming process and deviated us from the core goal of continuing building developer experience solutions. We were looking for a more stable version of the backstage to create a bandwidth for developers to focus on catalog, plugin & template development.

Red Hat Developer Hub (RHDH) scales our ecosystem which satisfies the above standards. We are still in the process of adoption based on progress. We want to share our journey with the wider community.

Migration Goals​

  1. Default functionalities should behave as expected
  2. Customizations should be preserved.
  3. Internally developed plugins and interfaces should work.
  4. SCM Integrations should work.

Current Adoption Progress​

1. Deployment of RHDH​

With the certified RHDH Helm Chart, we were able to deploy the bare metal version of RHDH smoothly to Red Hat Openshift with all the resources needed such as Routes, Databases and more. Manual Infrastructure setup complexity was eliminated in the first moment which was really a great relief.

Refined Documentation of the RHDH helped us at every stage with tuning the changes.

2. SCM Integration​

Our engineering ecosystem is distributed in a wider SCM Platforms GitHub and GitLab. We have successfully integrated the SCM systems with the RHDH very easily and were able to onboard projects to RHDH.

3. Authentication with the Enterprise Systems​

In our Community Backstage, we have used the SSO based on OIDC. We were able to migrate this successfully but still there are some small challenges especially with the login page. Still we are working on issue resolution.

Future Plans​

1. Dynamic Plugins​

In our ongoing adoption journey, we are looking forward to implementing dynamic plugins to enhance the customization and extensibility of our developer ecosystem. The adoption of dynamic plugins will further empower our developers and users, offering new features and capabilities to meet evolving needs. We plan to convert some of our plugins into dynamic ones and integrate them into RHDH in the upcoming weeks.

2. Customization​

We will be working on customizing the RHDH with respect to our team identity, especially Home Page and Plugins page. We will be working to migrate this customizations with support of dynamic plugins with the RHDH.

3. Techdocs​

Techdocs enablement we have spend some time for the enablement but we are still working on the complete migration of the documents to RHDH. This will be a continued effort for us.

4. Contributing to RHDH​

Janus is the upstream community of the Red Hat Developer Hub. There are a lot of contribution opportunities like plugin development, fixes and contributing to the IDP initiative. As a team we have contributed to the Janus Project on plugin development and fixes to the IDP

Benefits and Outcomes​

Since our adoption of the Red Hat Developer Hub (RHDH), we have observed several significant benefits and outcomes that have positively impacted our development ecosystem and streamlined our processes. Below are some of the key benefits and anticipated outcomes:

  • Great Support
  • Enhanced Stability and Reliability
  • Streamlined Deployment
  • Improved Documentation
  • Seamless SCM Integration

By sharing these benefits and outlining our adoption roadmap, to provide a comprehensive view of the positive changes and future enhancements that the Red Hat Developer Hub (RHDH) is bringing to your organization. We will share more in the Part 2