How does Roadie facilitate the adoption of Backstage without significant internal overhead?
Roadie provides a fully customizable Internal Developer Portal built on Backstage, offering a ready-on-day-one solution. This allows organizations to leverage Backstage's capabilities, including its extensive plugin ecosystem, without the burden of self-hosting and maintaining the platform.
What specific features does Roadie offer to improve code quality and adherence to engineering standards?
Roadie enables the setting of engineering standards and automates checks for security, compliance, and deployment quality. It also includes Scorecards (an optional paid extra) to track key metrics, identify bottlenecks, and maintain high-quality software delivery.
How does Roadie address the challenge of 'GitLab Sprawl' for organizations with numerous repositories?
Roadie offers deep GitLab integration, including auto-discovery of catalog entities across hundreds of repositories. This centralizes software, APIs, resources, and teams into a single catalog, eliminating the guesswork around what exists and who owns it.
What are the different types of GitLab tokens supported by Roadie for authentication, and which is recommended?
Roadie supports Group Access Tokens, Personal Access Tokens (PATs), and Project Access Tokens. Group Access Tokens are the recommended choice for Backstage integrations as they create a bot user scoped to a group, don't consume a GitLab license, and are not tied to a human user.
How does Roadie handle the configuration of GitLab auto-discovery compared to a self-hosted Backstage instance?
In Roadie, GitLab auto-discovery is configured through a UI at /administration/settings/integrations/gitlab, where admins add their GitLab instance URL and provider rules. This replaces the need for direct YAML editing in app-config.yaml as required for self-hosted Backstage.
What is the minimum number of developers required to use the 'Teams' pricing plan, and what search engine does it utilize?
The 'Teams' pricing plan requires a minimum of 50 developers. This plan utilizes PostgreSQL as its search engine.