The Digital Experience Platform (DXP) Adoption Journey with Red Hat Developer Hub - Part 1
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
- Default functionalities should behave as expected
- Customizations should be preserved.
- Internally developed plugins and interfaces should work.
- 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.