An all new (paginated) Catalog, the All Tab, and changes to the Admin area

The latest features and updates from Roadie.

Performance Improvements: Catalog Pagination & Service Workers

We mentioned in the previous Changelog that we’ve been working on a buffet of different improvements to both performance and stability to enable us to handle large Catalogs.

Top of mind this month has been performance of the backend and response time when users make simple requests of the Catalog. That means: pagination time.

The first pass of pagination has proven we can dramatically reduce page load times without impacting the current UI or UX. For the first customers to receive a paginated Catalog we’re already seeing a minimum of ~300ms decreases in load time for smaller Catalogs but at least 66% for XL Catalogs (i.e. 100s of thousands of entities).

This is comparing the P95 scores for page load that we see across all our customers. Red is the rollout where we migrated a few customers over but some customers remained on the older, unpaginated Catalog. Green is the period where the paginated Catalog was fully rolled out.

We’ve also tweaked the filtering UI to handle more filters, while disabling some (Some of the in-table filtering and sorting options are not possible with a paginated catalog).

And last but not least we’ve also changed the UI a little around filtering to clean up how crowded it can become if you have a table with lots of potential filters in place.

We’re also separately using service workers to pre-load some elements of the application to further speed up page load. More on that to come.

The rollout of the paginated Catalog has already begun, so more on this soon.

Fun stuff!

All hail the All tab

On a similar theme, the Catalog has also received a major update in the form of an All tab.

About a year ago we started the effort to make the Roadie Catalog as composable as possible.

The Backstage Catalog is extremely extensible and configurable, but sometimes the UI belies that flexibility and makes it feel a little restrictive.

We wanted to highlight the power and extensibility of Backstage in the Roadie-fied version, but also make it significantly easier to make changes to the Catalog.

That’s why we have Catalog Tabs (for making easy filters of the Catalog) and the Decorator (to make changes to entities via the UI or the API, without having to use YAML).

One issue with this novel approach is it created a long-tail of issues with plugins upstream. OSS plugins sometimes assume things like a Domain filter can be applied over the Catalog and a filtered list of Domains will be presented to the user. We don’t really have that concept by default (and we allow users to remove it) so we’ve hit a few bugs over the last few months.

The All tab solves that.

The All tab shows you your whole, unfiltered Catalog. You can apply filters over the top of it, as you like. Previous cards that linked through to filtered lists of Domains, Systems etc, will now land here.

We like it a lot - we hope you like it too.

Enjoy!

Admin Area glam-up [in beta]

The Admin area has also seem some significant changes this month.

The old Admin area had grown into a bit of a sprawl in recent times. 70+ plugins and integrations all mixed together, doesn’t lend itself to a clean and easy to navigate UX.

We decided a revamp was in order. We focused on the discoverability of plugins - namely moving to a card-based layout and refreshing the search. We also took the opportunity to make changes to the information architecture of this area to chunk up the config options into different tabs.

Next up we’ll be standardising each page to make adding secrets, seeing which cards and tabs that plugin exposes are being used, and understanding at a glance how it is configured. After that we’ll be looking at how simple health checks and status indicators for each plugin can give greater feedback to users about the health of that connection.

Enjoy.