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| Stage | Cross Section CI, CD, Core Platforms |
| Maturity | Planned |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2024-09-02 |
Thanks for visiting this category direction page on Developer Portal in GitLab. This page is Cross-section catgeory, and is owned by Jackie Porter, Viktor Nagy, and Josh Lambert.
This direction page is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute:
The Developer Portal category aims to provide a comprehensive set of tools and services that empower developers to self-serve and easily find the DevSecOps resources they need as offered by GitLab or 3rd party integrators. On the market today, Internal developer platforms (IdPs), aim to make developers faster by removing manual tasks and providing consolidation of resources into a centralized pane. With the Developer Portal category, we aim to create a SSoT for the developer to easily contextualize the GitLab resources relevant for their Application, services and processes.
Key focus areas for the Developer Portal include:
By addressing these areas, we aim to provide a unified platform that covers the entire software development lifecycle, from coding to deployment and beyond.
IdPs and service catalogs are becoming more and more urgent in terms of meeting customer expectations in the DevSecOps landscape although, these efforts are not planned or funded in the next year.
We are conducting longer term research, proof of concepts, and integrations with ecosystems tools to provide a better experience for our customers. Related to self-service automation we are defining the Eventing strategy that will be foundational for how users would conduct automation in a Developer Portal.
This category is currently not funded.
Implementation of features or epics.
Beyond 2025, we do have plans to invest in Developer Portal. The roadmap for Developer Portal include:
There are currently two main competitive solutions in market: Backstage.io and Port.
There are some real values and strengths of Backstage from the market and user POV:
The drawbacks we have heard is that the the intial configuration and maintenance overhead is high. Additionally, the navigation is painful to use.
Port is the second most commonly used IdP offering and has some strong advantages to Backstage, these include:
The drawbacks of Port from customers are the breadth of customizable metrics in the scorcards and benchmarks are not as flexible.
For Developer Portal, we are targeting the following personas, as ranked by priority for support:
BIC (Best In Class) is an indicator of forecasted near-term market performance based on a combination of factors, including analyst views, market news, and feedback from the sales and product teams. It is critical that we understand where GitLab appears in the BIC landscape.
We are discussing the potential approach internally. As we expect this to be a cross-section initiative, we created a gap analysis (internal only) to highlight the various domains involved.
There are currently two main competitive solutions in market: Backstage.io and Port.
Backstage is an open source, plugin-based, component registry framework. Backstage ships to some extent all the mentioned key capabilities. It's primary strengths are
Its primary weaknesses are:
Port is a closed source IdP offering and has some strong advantages over Backstage. Port ships to some extent all the mentioned key capabilities. It's primary strengths are
Its primary weaknesses are:
For Developer Portal, we are targeting the following personas, as ranked by priority for support:
TBD