u/Eweka01

Hey Guys

I've been prepping for platform engineering interviews and got tired of *describing* what an IDP does, so I built one and put it on the public internet. Whole thing runs on an old laptop through a Cloudflare Tunnel — no VPS, no cloud bill, $0/month.

Live demo: https://backstage.gabrieleweka.dev (GitHub or Google sign-in)

The developer flow:

Click Create → type an app name → pick prod or dev → wait ~2 min.

You get:

• A GitHub repo scaffolded from a software template (Flask API + frontend + Helm chart)
• Full CI/CD via GitHub Actions (super-linter, Trivy fs + image scan, build, push, update Helm values, sync ArgoCD)
• Kubernetes deploy with valid TLS at `<app>-<env>.gabrieleweka.dev`
• A per-app Grafana dashboard auto-created via the Helm chart (pods, CPU, mem, network, crash count, links back to repo + ArgoCD)
• TechDocs rendered inside Backstage

Other URLs to poke at:

• ArgoCD (read-only): https://argocd.gabrieleweka.dev — `viewer / viewer123`
• Grafana (anonymous viewer): http://grafana.gabrieleweka.dev
• Prometheus: http://prometheus.gabrieleweka.dev

Tradeoffs I made and why:

• Cloudflare Tunnel over a VPS — free, no open ports on my router, simpler attack surface
• kind cluster on the laptop — single-node, but lets me iterate fast and the whole stack is reproducible from scratch
• Apps auto-delete after 30 min via a CronJob (reaper) — keeps demos tidy and bounds the blast radius of letting strangers click Create

Caveats / known issues:

• Anyone who signs in can scaffold right now (gating to a GitHub org is on my punch-list)
• If the laptop's offline, so is the demo — fair warning

Genuinely curious what people here would do differently, especially guys who've built real IDPs at work. Roast welcome.