Platform Self-Service, Templates & Integration

🛠 Lab from the Platform Engineering Bootcamp. Used in Week 13. Bootcamp landing page: https://academy.tekanaid.com/bootcamps/platform-engineering-bootcamp Parent course(s):

• Week 13: Backstage: Internal Developer Portal (slug: backstage-developer-portal)

Author two real Backstage software templates that turn the Terraform and Ansible automation from Weeks 11 and 12 into a self-service front door: a "Bootstrap TaskFlow Environment" template that provisions compute with Terraform and deploys the app with Ansible, and a "TaskFlow Day-2 Operations" template that ships version bumps and dependency patches to a running environment by re-running the same idempotent rolling-update playbook. Both templates publish real GitHub Actions workflow YAML and dispatch it via Backstage's built-in scaffolder actions.

You'll write template.yaml definitions with parameters and actions, generate real infra/ Terraform and .github/workflows/ files from a skeleton/ directory, use fetch:template, publish:github, and github:actions:dispatch actions, integrate Backstage with GitHub for repository visibility on taskflow-backend and taskflow-frontend, connect Kubernetes annotations to the real backend Deployment from Week 8, link Prometheus and Grafana dashboards, set up authentication with GitHub OAuth, and configure RBAC for team permissions.

This is a config-authoring lab: you write and validate the templates, workflows, and integration config that a platform team would commit to their Backstage instance (the one already running from this week's first two labs). Running either template for real would provision real AWS infrastructure and deploy real containers, exactly as already proven live in the Week 11 and Week 12 labs, so this lab validates workflow correctness with actionlint and yamllint rather than re-running that live provisioning cycle a third time.