Platforms Thoughtworks Technology Radar 27. Backstage Adopt In an increasingly digital world, improving developer effectiveness in large organizations is often a core concern of senior leaders. We’ve seen enough value with developer portals in general and Backstage in particular that we’re happy to recommend it in Adopt. Backstage is an open-source developer portal platform created by Spotify that improves discovery of software assets across the organization. It uses Markdown TechDocs that live alongside the code for each service, which nicely balances the needs of centralized discovery with the need for distributed ownership of assets. Backstage supports software templates to accelerate new development and a plugin architecture that allows for extensibility and adaptability into an organization’s infrastructure ecosystem. Backstage Service Catalog uses YAML files to track ownership and metadata for all the software in an organization’s ecosystem; it even lets you track third-party SaaS software, which usually requires tracking ownership. 28. Delta Lake Adopt Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer, implemented by Databricks, that attempts to bring ACID transactions to big data processing. In our Databricks-enabled data lake or data mesh projects, our teams prefer using Delta Lake storage over the direct use of file storage types such as AWS S3 or ADLS. Until recently, Delta Lake has been a closed proprietary product from Databricks, but it’s now open source and accessible to non-Databricks platforms. However, our recommendation of Delta Lake as a default choice currently extends only to Databricks projects that use Parquet file formats. Delta Lake facilitates concurrent data read/write use cases where file-level transactionality is required. We find Delta Lake’s seamless integration with Apache Spark batch and micro-batch APIs very helpful, particularly features such as time travel (accessing data at a particular point in time or commit reversion) as well as schema evolution support on write. 29. AWS Database Migration Service Trial Many of our teams have successfully used AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate data to and from AWS. In one of our Digital Transformation engagements, we achieved nearly zero downtime cut-over to the new system as we migrated data from Microsoft SQL Server to an AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) PostgreSQL instance. Such transformations involve many moving parts that require planning and coordination across multidisciplinary teams, but for data migration we’re quite happy with DMS. It automatically manages the deployment, management and monitoring of all required resources. Over the years DMS has matured to support several source and target databases, and we continue to like it. 30. Colima Trial Colima is becoming a popular open alternative to Docker Desktop. It provisions the Docker container run time in a Lima VM, configures the Docker CLI on macOS and handles port-forwarding and volume mounts. Colima uses containerd as its run time, which is also the run time on most managed © Thoughtworks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 21