The Path Towards a One-Stop Shop for Developers

Productization of our services is a key enabler to enhance developer experience at Allianz Technology. We want to create global products that can be easily discovered and consumed, based on a common and harmonized tech stack. To go one step further in our journey, we are proud to announce that we have started developing an internal Developer Portal based on Spotify’s Backstage.io. Enhancing developer experience is a major focus for us now and we believe that a dedicated developer portal will help our transformation to become a true technology company.

“This portal will be key for improving the developer experience by making it easier for our engineers to discover and consume the developer tools and services we provide. Moreover, it will set the standard for developer tooling at Allianz Technology: pre-integrated and ready to use, to drive a harmonized tech stack across the company.”

Daniel Besendorfer, CEO Allianz Technology

 

Our mission "create a one-stop shop for all development needs"

A dedicated team around Jochen Supper will bring backstage.io to Allianz Technology:

Key objectives:
1. Build a one-stop shop for all developer tools, products and documentations

2. Ease developer onboarding (quick start to use assets, bootstrapping, etc.)

3. Provide a standard tech stack with best practices baked into the default setups

 

We will start with a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that will enable front-end development teams to create new products with a simple setup process from creating a GitHub repository, scaffolding an Angular NDBX project and setting up a CI/CD pipeline on Jenkins. Further iterations will go beyond just front-end components to cover the entire stack and tooling of Allianz Technology.

Hundreds of our services already use Angular NDBX. However, we see more potential by enabling our colleagues with an effortless way to get started. We will continuously improve the portal by adding more features and scope. In the end-state, developers should be able to start developing code that solves a customer problem after just a few clicks – having the default tech stack (security, pipelines, monitoring, etc.) out of the box.

How can I get involved?

The project will be open for contribution to all colleagues. Everyone is welcome to contribute by proposing innovative ideas and open pull request on GitHub.

Furthermore, we are interested in your opinion as a developer at Allianz Technology: what pain points do you observe in your daily work and what do you want to see in the upcoming developer portal? We invite you to take a quick three-minute survey and will use the gathered feedback to create our vision and roadmap.

We will use backstage.io as the technical foundation:

Last year, Spotify open-sourced their internal developer portal backstage.io, which they have been building over the last 5 years to provide their engineers with a golden path towards creating highly consumable products. By doing so, Spotify has reduced the cognitive overload for engineers and increased feature velocity. Spotify is internally using Backstage for the whole software development lifecycle and enabling teams to own their services end-to-end form developing to operating. 

Behind the scenes look

Backstage has seen tremendous adoption over the last years, from American Airlines to Zalando. Most recently, Spotify donated backstage.io and transferred ownership to the CNCF Cloud Native Computing Foundation, that is also overlooking projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus which are already adopted at Allianz Technology. We are looking forward to adding Allianz to the growing numbers of adopters.

What is coming next?

We are currently setting up the basics and will start our concept sprint to flesh out our MVP. You can help us by providing you input in this short 3-minute survey. If you want to get involved, please leave a comment on this post and we will make sure to keep you in the close loop with updates on how to contribute.

Related Topics: