How to Automate Ephemeral Environments for Development Branch Protection

Karl’s team at American Airlines were early adopters of Backstage, and in this episode he shares their journey of implementing and rolling out a developer portal. He also describes two of the extensions his team has built for their portal.

Discussion points:

• (1:24) Where the idea of building a developer portal came from
• (7:24) What the developer experience looked like before the portal 
• (10:41) Initiating the project
• (14:16) The decision to choose Backstage 
• (16:28) The V1 scope for the portal 
• (19:14) Getting adoption for the portal
• (23:35) Defining success for the portal’s adoption 
• (28:04) The ideal state for how developers will use the portal
• (30:56) Who should or shouldn’t invest in building a developer portal 
• (33:14) Custom extensions Karl’s team has developed for their portal
• (37:46) What’s difficult about developing a new plugin for the backstage platform

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Mentions and links:
Follow Karl on LinkedIn
The Runway platform at American Airlines
Read more on the engineering blog from American Airlines