The Latest Rackspace Technology Innovation in Platform Engineering: Azure Custom Actions for Backstage

Introduction and high-level overview of Backstage

Backstage, an open-source platform by Spotify, has significantly reshaped the landscape of software development and operations. It functions as a developer portal, centralizing and streamlining the management of software development processes. By integrating various infrastructure tools and services, Backstage offers a unified and intuitive interface that enhances productivity and simplifies the developer experience.

The challenge of working in an Azure environment

While Backstage excels at automating and organizing workflows, there is very little out-of-the-box functionality that is specific to working within an Azure environment.

Our solution: Azure Custom Actions

Rackspace Technology® has developed several custom actions to demonstrate the ability to create and manipulate objects within an Azure-specific workspace. These utilize Azure SDKs to allow both authentication and object initiation.

What these actions offer 

Azure Custom Actions offer some basic templates and constructs to show how to use a basic backstage action and then output any resultant values that need to be consumed by other processes. Authentication is enabled via a provided ID and secret for the service principal.

Intended use

The Rackspace custom actions collection is intended to be used as a technology demonstrator which can be easily expanded and customized as the scenario dictates.