Consumable Infrastructure

Building a Unified Front End for Spectro Cloud Palette

When an infrastructure platform expands its capabilities, it can create an unintended barrier: the broader its feature set, the more complex it can become for developers and platform consumers to access what they need.

Spectro Cloud’s Palette platform simplifies the management and governance of Kubernetes across data centers, edge environments, and public clouds from a single control plane. As the platform expanded, Spectro Cloud wanted to make infrastructure consumption and cluster provisioning simpler for users while maintaining governance, automation, and platform consistency across environments.

As an official Spectro Cloud partner, TeraSky built an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) layer on top of Palette. The objective was to provide direct self-service access while preserving the controls platform teams rely on. The solution was designed as a reusable Backstage distribution that Spectro Cloud could deploy for its own customers, rather than as a one-off implementation for a single environment.

The Operational Challenge: Simplifying Consumption Without Losing Control

Spectro Cloud wanted to create a single self-service access point where users could request Kubernetes-as-a-Service, VM-as-a-Service, and Bare-Metal-as-a-Service on demand.

The experience needed to make infrastructure easier to consume while keeping governance, automation, and platform consistency intact across different infrastructure types and cloud providers.

That required more than a front-end portal. The underlying workflows also needed to connect directly to Palette, automate provisioning, integrate authentication, and support Infrastructure as Code and GitOps-based delivery.

The Architecture: A Backstage-Powered Accelerator

TeraSky designed and built a Backstage-powered platform engineering accelerator integrated directly with Spectro Cloud Palette.

The team built on TeraSky’s existing open-source Backstage work, including plugins for Kubernetes Ingestor, Kyverno, Crossplane, and KRO, and developed additional Spectro Cloud-specific plugins and integrations. This gave the project a reusable engineering foundation from the start while allowing the experience to be tailored directly to Palette.

Through the Backstage interface, users can access standardized self-service workflows for Kubernetes-as-a-Service, VM-as-a-Service, and Bare-Metal-as-a-Service. Behind the interface, the framework connects those requests to Palette resources and automated provisioning workflows.

The solution includes:

• Direct Palette Integration: Visibility into Palette resources and direct integration with the platform.
• Automated Provisioning: GitOps-driven workflows supported by Terraform and Crossplane.
• Authentication Integration: Access is integrated into the platform experience.
• Infrastructure as Code: Provisioning is standardized through declarative automation rather than manual processes.

The framework supports infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments, giving users a common self-service experience while platform teams maintain a consistent operational model.

How the Accelerator Works

The Result: Repeatable Delivery and Faster Adoption

By building a modular platform accelerator rather than a one-off custom integration, TeraSky created an asset that extends beyond a single project.

The combination of existing TeraSky IP, newly developed Spectro Cloud-specific plugins, and a packaged Backstage distribution provides Spectro Cloud with a repeatable way to deliver the experience to additional customers.

The platform provides users with a unified way to consume infrastructure through standardized workflows while preserving governance, repeatability, and consistency across cloud and on-premises environments. That can help reduce the complexity of infrastructure consumption and make Palette easier to adopt across a wider set of use cases.

For Spectro Cloud and TeraSky, the accelerator provides a reusable blueprint for secure, self-service infrastructure delivery, eliminating the need for every customer to build the experience from scratch. It also demonstrates how TeraSky turns platform engineering expertise into reusable IP that can extend the value of a partner platform across multiple customer environments.