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From Chaos to Clarity: Booking.com’s Journey to a Unified Developer Experience with Backstage 🚀
Ever felt lost in the labyrinth of a large tech company, struggling to find the right tools, understand what’s expected of you, or even grasp how to get things done? If so, you’ll resonate with the challenges Booking.com faced before embarking on their ambitious journey to create a unified developer experience. Join Symbat Nurbay and Xicu Piñera as they share their incredible story of building “Bstage” and its evolution into the “Engineering Portal,” all powered by the open-source platform, Backstage. 💡
The Problem: The “Where,” “What,” and “How” Dilemma 🤯
Booking.com, a titan with over 5,000 engineers, grappled with a significant problem: cognitive load. Developers were spending too much time figuring out basic operational tasks, leading to inefficiencies and frustration. The core issues boiled down to three critical questions:
- Where? Engineers couldn’t easily find the right tools to maintain their services.
- What? Once a tool was found, it wasn’t always clear what was expected from the developer.
- How? The sheer scale meant many engineers, particularly platform and backend engineers, were building their own user interfaces with limited frontend expertise, leading to a fragmented and inconsistent experience.
Enter Bstage: The First Leap with Backstage ✨
To tackle this, Booking.com decided to build an internal developer portal, affectionately named “Bstage” (a clever blend of Booking and Backstage). Initially, Bstage was envisioned to host tools from their own team and a few others. However, its utility quickly became apparent to a wider audience.
Key Achievements of Bstage:
- Unified Tooling: Bstage successfully consolidated tools in a single location, solving the “where” problem.
- Plugin Ecosystem: It became incredibly easy for plugin owners, even those with limited frontend experience, to contribute their tools.
- Rapid Growth: Within a year, Bstage boasted over 40 plugins and attracted 1.5k daily active users.
The “Victims of Success” Moment: Unforeseen Challenges 🚧
While Bstage was a hit, its success brought new challenges. The team realized they had created more tools than expected, and not everyone was singing its praises.
New Problems Uncovered:
- The “Where” Problem Returns: Despite tools being in one place, navigating the ever-growing number of plugins made it difficult to find specific services.
- Partial “How” Solution: While Bstage introduced a unified UI, the disconnected nature of the tools still left a gap in providing a truly seamless experience.
- Introduced Toil: The process of reviewing merge requests from numerous plugin owners created a new layer of manual toil for the core team.
Reimagining the Developer Experience: The Engineering Portal 🛠️
Recognizing these shortcomings, Booking.com took a step back and decided to rebuild from the ground up, focusing on user experience and a clear strategy. This led to the creation of the Engineering Portal.
Key Innovations in the Engineering Portal:
- Personalized Dashboards: Users can now customize their dashboards with widgets developed by different teams, tailored to their preferences.
- AI-Powered Global Search 🤖: This intelligent search scours not only the Engineering Portal but also other sources within Booking.com, optimizing information retrieval.
- Streamlined Plugin Onboarding: A clear onboarding process and AI reviews for new code significantly eased the burden on plugin owners, enabling independent contributions and reducing the core team’s bottleneck.
- Team Pages 👨👩👧👦: These pages aggregate all metrics and relevant information for a specific team’s services, eliminating the need to jump between multiple plugins. Examples include tech guiding principles, maturity scores, service level objectives, cloud costs, rollout blocks, and assigned merge requests.
The Cycle of Improvement: Continuous Evolution Continues 🔄
Even with the impressive Engineering Portal, the journey wasn’t over. User feedback highlighted further areas for refinement. This led to a shift towards a continuous improvement mindset.
Further Enhancements:
- Tools Page: A new page with search and filters makes navigating the vast array of tools much easier, including those not directly within the portal.
- Global Bookmarks 🔖: This feature, now available across all pages, allows users to bookmark their favorite content for quick access.
- Entity Pages (formerly Service Details): Reworked for better context and unified data, these pages make it easier for users to find the specific information they need about services.
- AI Summaries for Team Performance 📊: Providing a quick overview of key insights and issues that require attention, these AI summaries offer immediate value.
Lessons Learned and Future Horizons 🚀
Symbat and Xicu shared invaluable lessons from their experience:
- Embrace Continuous Improvement: Building an internal developer portal is an endless journey, not a one-time product.
- Listen to Your Users: It’s impossible to please everyone, but actively seeking feedback and understanding user needs is paramount.
- Involve UX Early and Often: For any internal developer portal initiative, getting UX experts involved from the very beginning is crucial, especially in engineering-heavy organizations.
Looking ahead, Booking.com is excited about:
- Chatbot AI Assistant 💬: To help users find information faster and navigate the portal more efficiently, reducing search and help-seeking time.
- New Inbox System 📬: With improved content control, better access management, and auto-archiving of notifications.
- Operational Lifecycle Management ⚙️: Standardizing and automating the entire service lifecycle, from onboarding to decommissioning.
The Backstage Advantage: A Powerful Foundation 🌐
Booking.com’s story powerfully illustrates the benefits of using Backstage for building internal developer platforms. They highlight its out-of-the-box tools, a great community, and virtually endless customization options.
Their core message is clear: treat your internal developer portal as a continuous journey, embrace feedback, and collaborate closely with your colleagues. The goal of reducing cognitive load and KTLO (Keep The Lights On) has been met, but the pursuit of an even better developer experience is ongoing.
Final Thoughts:
Booking.com’s journey is a testament to the power of listening, adapting, and continuously innovating. By leveraging Backstage and fostering a culture of collaboration, they’ve transformed their internal developer experience from a source of frustration to a driver of efficiency and satisfaction. If you’re considering building your own IDP, let their story inspire you to embark on your own exciting and rewarding journey! ✨