Backstage on Google Cloud Quickstart¶

This quick-start deployment guide can be used to set up an environment to familiarize yourself with the architecture and get an understanding of the concepts related to hosting Backstage on Google Cloud.

NOTE: This environment is not intended to be a long lived environment. It is intended for temporary demonstration and learning purposes. You will need to modify the configurations provided to align with your orginazations needs. Along the way the guide will make callouts to tasks or areas that should be productionized in for long lived deployments.

Architecture¶

The following diagram depicts the high level architecture of the infrastucture that will be deployed.

architecture

Requirements and Assumptions¶

To keep this guide simple it makes a few assumptions. Where the are alternatives we have linked to some additional documentation.

The Backstage quick start will be deployed in a new project that you will manually create. If you want to use a project managed through Terraform refer to the Terraform managed project section.
Identity Aware Proxy (IAP) will be used for controlling access to Backstage.

Before you begin¶

In this section you prepare a folder for deployment.

Open the Cloud Console
Activate Cloud Shell \ At the bottom of the Cloud Console, a Cloud Shell session starts and displays a command-line prompt.

Project Creation¶

In this section you prepare your project for deployment.

Go to the project selector page in the Cloud Console. Select or create a Cloud project.
Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project. Learn how to confirm billing is enabled for your project.

In Cloud Shell, set environment variables with the ID of your project:

export PROJECT_ID=<INSERT_YOUR_PROJECT_ID>
gcloud config set project "${PROJECT_ID}"

Clone the repository and change directory to the guide directory

git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/platform-engineering && \
cd platform-engineering/reference-architectures/backstage/backstage-quickstart

Set environment variables

export BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR=$(pwd) && \
sed -n -i -e '/^export BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR=/!p' -i -e '$aexport  \
BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR="'"${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}"'"' ${HOME}/.bashrc

Project Configuration¶

Set the project environment variables in Cloud Shell

export BACKSTAGE_QS_STATE_BUCKET="${PROJECT_ID}-terraform"
export IAP_USER_DOMAIN="<your org's domain>"
export IAP_SUPPORT_EMAIL="<your org's support email>"

Create a Cloud Storage bucket to store the Terraform state

gcloud storage buckets create gs://${BACKSTAGE_QS_STATE_BUCKET} --project ${PROJECT_ID}

Set the configuration variables

sed -i "s/YOUR_STATE_BUCKET/${BACKSTAGE_QS_STATE_BUCKET}/g" ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/backend.tf
sed -i "s/YOUR_PROJECT_ID/${PROJECT_ID}/g" ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/backstage-qs.auto.tfvars
sed -i "s/YOUR_IAP_USER_DOMAIN/${IAP_USER_DOMAIN}/g" ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/backstage-qs.auto.tfvars
sed -i "s/YOUR_IAP_SUPPORT_EMAIL/${IAP_SUPPORT_EMAIL}/g" ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/backstage-qs.auto.tfvars

Deploy Backstage¶

Before running Terraform, make sure that the Service Usage API and Service Management API are enabled.

Enable Service Usage API and Service Management API

gcloud services enable serviceusage.googleapis.com \
gcloud services enable servicemanagement.googleapis.com

Create the resources

cd ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR} && \
terraform init && \
terraform plan -input=false -out=tfplan && \
terraform apply -input=false tfplan && \
rm tfplan

This will take a while to create all of the required resources, figure somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes.

Cleanup¶

Destroy the resources using Terraform destroy

cd ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR} && \
terraform init && \
terraform destroy -auto-approve && \
rm -rf .terraform .terraform.lock.hcl

Delete the project
```
gcloud projects delete ${PROJECT_ID}
```

Remove Terraform files and temporary files

cd ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR} && \
rm -rf \
.terraform \
.terraform.lock.hcl \
initialize/.terraform \
initialize/.terraform.lock.hcl \
initialize/backend.tf.local \
initialize/state

Reset the TF variables file

cd ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR} && \
cp backstage-qs-auto.tfvars.local backstage-qs.auto.tfvars

Remove the environment variables

sed \
-i -e '/^export BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR=/d' \
${HOME}/.bashrc

Advanced Options¶

Terraform managed project¶

In some instances you will need to create and manage the project through Terraform. This quickstart provides a sample process and Terraform to create and destory the project via Terraform.

To run this part of the quick start you will need the following information and permissions.

Billing account ID
Organization or folder ID
roles/billing.user IAM permissions on the billing account specified
roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator IAM permissions on the organization or folder specified

Creating a Terraform managed project¶

Set the configuration variables
```
nano ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/initialize/initialize.auto.tfvars
```
```
environment_name  = "qs"
iapUserDomain = ""
iapSupportEmail = ""
project = {
  billing_account_id = "XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX"
  folder_id          = "############"
  name               = "backstage"
  org_id             = "############"
}
```
Values required :
- environment_name: the name of the environment (defaults to qs for quickstart)
- iapUserDomain: the root domain of the GCP Org that the Backstage users will be in
- iapSupportEmail: support contact for the IAP brand
- project.billing_account_id: the billing account ID
- project.name: the prefix for the display name of the project, the full name will be <project.name>-<environment_name>
- Either project.folder_id OR project.org_id
  - project.folder_id: the Google Cloud folder ID
  - project.org_id: the Google Cloud organization ID

Authorize gcloud

gcloud auth login --activate --no-launch-browser --quiet --update-adc

Create a new project

cd ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/initialize
terraform init && \
terraform plan -input=false -out=tfplan && \
terraform apply -input=false tfplan && \
rm tfplan && \
terraform init -force-copy -migrate-state && \
rm -rf state

Set the project environment variables in Cloud Shell

PROJECT_ID=$(grep environment_project_id \
${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/backstage-qs.auto.tfvars |
awk -F"=" '{print $2}' | xargs)

Cleaning up a Terraform managed project¶

Destroy the project

cd ${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/initialize && \
TERRAFORM_BUCKET_NAME=$(grep bucket backend.tf | awk -F"=" '{print $2}' |
xargs) && \
cp backend.tf.local backend.tf && \
terraform init -force-copy -lock=false -migrate-state && \
gsutil -m rm -rf gs://${TERRAFORM_BUCKET_NAME}/* && \
terraform init && \
terraform destroy -auto-approve  && \
rm -rf .terraform .terraform.lock.hcl state/

Re-using an Existing Project¶

In situations where you have run this quickstart before and then cleaned-up the resources but are re-using the project, it might be neccasary to restore the endpoints from a deleted state first.

BACKSTAGE_QS_PREFIX=$(grep environment_name \
${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/backstage-qs.auto.tfvars | awk -F"=" '{print $2}' | xargs)
BACKSTAGE_QS_PROJECT_ID=$(grep environment_project_id \
${BACKSTAGE_QS_BASE_DIR}/backstage-qs.auto.tfvars | awk -F"=" '{print $2}' | xargs)
gcloud endpoints services undelete \
${BACKSTAGE_QS_PREFIX}.endpoints.${BACKSTAGE_QS_PROJECT_ID}.cloud.goog \
--quiet 2>/dev/null