For a small startup, poking around in the gcp/aws console works well enough. Maintaining another console layer on top of that feels like one more thing that could break.
If you’re a big company with a team that could support developer platform tools, you probably have some sort of portal system hacked together and you’ll never be able to change because somebody has a critical dependency on the old system
(Another thought: "short" and "long" terms are variable for different teams and different types of services. Scheduling should take that into account.)
Admittedly, however, I've not been through it at a particularly large organization. I'm sure there is exponentially metastasizing complexity (human perhaps even more than technical) once the process involves more people than can fit in a room.
It might not be a massive market, but there are a few interesting companies building this kind of tools and they sell it
We were early adopters of Backstage, back in 2020. We've migrated almost all of our portals and "meta-infrastructure" to Backstage, and it's certainly not perfect, and not everyone has moved over, but the majority of our teams are in one service catalogue and people can much more easily find service owners, dependencies and more.
It's been a great tool and a pretty big internal success story for us.
But this move from Spotify tells me that they are no longer stewards of an open source project, they now use open source as a loss-leader for their paid offerings.
Which is totally fine, but it will change how we look at that relationship.
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