“Build the portal or this platform from the user perspective.”
“It’s way better - in our experience - to only start with one thing, do it right, do it with quality, add all the custom integration with it that serves our needs, and then look at the other feature that we want to integrate.”
In the demo, you can hear about:
Challenges at Adyen:
when a company is growing, it becomes hard to determine who is responsible for what, and
questions like ‘Where can I find the API docs?’ and ‘Why did the deployment fail?’ arise.
Solution: one frontend to all of the internal platform offerings, which results in unifying tooling, enhances engineering autonomy (self-service), and reduces the cognitive load.
Backstage was a suitable framework for Adyen, mostly because of the plugins.
Building blocks based on needs,such as service catalog including the provided and consumed APIs.
Additional challenges: service onboarding (learning curve), governance (centralizing the catalog).
Adyen’s plans for the future: more plugins, API support, federated search, and automatic catalog manipulation.
Takeaways
Take a deep breath (it can be tempting to try out everything).
Listen to the user.
Hide the complexity from users.
Start slow and small.
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