emma’s Backstage Plugins Meet Your DevOps Where They Are

Cloud providers, in order to bind their users and restrict them to their internal ecosystems, offer end-to-end, native solutions and create proprietary UIs. They may do this under the pretext of better integration between native services and a consistent user experience, but development teams rarely prefer being tied to specific providers or environments. They need the flexibility to pick and choose the technologies and platforms that best serve their needs and continue working with the tools and environments they choose, without being restricted to specific cloud providers.

The emma cloud management platform provides this flexibility, allowing DevOps to provision resources across any cloud of their choice in a standardized manner. Given our cloud-agnostic philosophy, we choose integrations over isolation. We are committed to integrating with developers' platforms of choice, enabling them to innovate in familiar environments while still leveraging emma’s unique capabilities. In this regard, emma has rolled out three plugins for Backstage – a powerful open-source platform created by Spotify that allows DevOps to build custom developer portals.

Introducing emma’s Backstage Plugins

emma offers plugins that allow Backstage users to bring emma’s VM management interface and cost visualization feature directly into the Backstage environment. This allows development teams to easily find the best CPU prices in the market and provision VMs and other cloud resources from the sidebar of their Backstage developer portals.

The plugins are:

1. emma plugin: A frontend plugin that allows visualization and interactions with cloud service data. It includes key components like HeatMapComponent and HeatMapPageComponent, which are used to display real-time cloud provider costs in an intuitive manner.
2. emma-backend plugin: Responsible for data processing and handling API interactions for the frontend plugin.
3. emma-common plugin: Provides shared resources such as constants, types, and API methods that are used by both the frontend and backend plugins.

Who is it for?

This integration is for cloud and platform engineers and leaders focused on ensuring that developers can seamlessly provision the cloud resources they need while staying aware of the cloud costs and resource consumption and actively contributing to controlling cloud costs.

How does it work?

By installing these plugins, DevOps can integrate emma’s visualizations directly into their developer portals. Essentially, it adds emma’s components to Backstage’s sidebar, allowing users to access emma’s features seamlessly without switching screens. After installation, two key pages appear in the sidebar:

1. Compute Component: This allows developers to create and provision VMs using emma’s intuitive format. emma interacts with cloud providers in the backend to deploy, monitor, and scale those VMs based on the defined parameters.
2. HeatMap Component: This helps developers to see compute costs by cloud provider and data center location before provisioning a VM.

How to Install and Use emma’s Plugins in Backstage:

Follow the Getting Started Guide on installing the emma backstage plugins: https://github.com/emma-community/emma-backstage-plugins/blob/main/docs/getting-started.md