tl;dr: We've set up the new community plugins repository, and have migrated most of the packages in the plugins directory of the main Backstage repository to their new home!

For those who depended on these plugins, migrating is as simple as yarn backstage-cli versions:bump then yarn backstage-cli versions:migrate. If you're already on 1.26.1, then be sure to run yarn backstage-cli versions:bump --skip-migrate then yarn backstage-cli versions:migrate to take advantage of the code reference replacement helpers.

tl;dr: And with that the first BackstageCon Europe comes to an end! The City of Light was good to Backstage with many great conversations at both BackstageCon and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024. If you weren't able to join, the CNCF has a great playlist of all the BackstageCon talks ready to go on YouTube. Check out some of the highlights below — then grab your popcorn and settle in!

TL;DR: For the Backstage maintainers, ensuring that the project is secure for every adopter and end user is one of our top priorities. With the recent discovery of CVE-2024-26150, we've shipped fixes for versions > v1.15.0. Please update your Backstage instance.

tl;dr BackstageCon North America is officially in the books! We had a blast in Chicago talking about Backstage non-stop throughout the week at both BackstageCon and KubeCon. If you weren't able to join us, the BackstageCon talks are available for replay on the CNCF YouTube channel.

TL;DR Chicago Trading Company (CTC) adopted Backstage ten months ago to help reduce onboarding frictions with their new cloud-based DevOps Kubernetes platform. Through templatization and open feedback loops, the team has conservatively saved 18 months of developer time to date with Backstage. We spoke with CTC DevOps engineer Scott Kausler who shared the details of their onboarding journey, lessons learned, and insights for other Backstage adopters.

Editor's Note: In this post, Expedia Group provides a follow-up to their initial Q4 2021 post on how they measure Backstage proof of value. We're grateful to the Expedia Group team for sharing their processes, revised proof of value metrics, and adaptations to their approach over time in hopes of providing a successful framework for the rest of the Backstage community.

Expedia Group's mission is to power global travel for everyone, everywhere. This vision is made possible through Expedia Group's massive platform, which connects 168 million loyalty members, 50 thousand B2B partners, 3 million properties and 500 airlines, car rentals and cruise lines across the globe. In short, the scale of our platform is enormous, which means that we need to scale our engineering capabilities as well so we can continue to provide seamless experiences to our travelers and partners.

At Frontside, our goal is to help cloud-native teams create cohesive development experiences. We've been at the Backstage party since the beginning helping companies adopt and extend Backstage to fit the needs of their unique ecosystems.

Through our experience, we've uncovered five common traits of organizations that have improved developer experience through successful Backstage implementation and adoption. In this blog, we'll dive into these traits with some thoughts on how you can follow their blueprint.

TL;DR: Monitoring the health of a software application goes beyond surfacing API errors and customer-facing issues. It requires a comprehensive understanding of every facet of a service, including process metrics like DORA, as well as clear ownership of services and processes. By implementing Elevate as an internal developer portal, development teams now have better visibility of ownership in the distributed systems they work in. They also have the benefit of consolidated application health data and other metrics gained from the SaaS products they utilize everyday. This approach ensures a “single pane of glass” for application ownership and health so our teams can focus on building products and features that help our customers invest for a prosperous future.

TL;DR: For the Backstage maintainers, ensuring that the project is highly secure for every adopter and end-user is one of our top priorities. With the recent vulnerabilities in the vm2 sandbox we have decided to move away from vm2 and use isolated-vm instead, in order to ensure the security of the Backstage end-users.

This blog post is co-authored by Emma White (@ewhite1997), Spotify.

TL;DR: Backstage released a new CLI earlier this year as part of a new Backstage project. This new capability allows early adopters to deploy their Backstage proof of concept faster than before. In this blog, you’ll learn a little bit more about the Deploy CLI and how you can get started with it.