We had a blast talking all things Backstage at KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam last week. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap:

TL;DR Spotify released Backstage into open source three years ago today. Since then, the community has grown by leaps and bounds to stretch across the globe (and the Discord server!). Now that Backstage is a threenager, the growing pains are real. So, on this birthday, we want to cover our collective efforts to make it easier to adopt and contribute to Backstage.

UPDATE: The backend system is now released! See the v1.18 release notes.

For the past year, the Backstage maintainer team has been spending time to give the old Backstage backend system a much needed revamp. Our goal was not to build something completely new from scratch, but rather to solidify the existing foundations that have grown organically. We wanted to make plugin installation a lot simpler, while maintaining and even improving the ways in which you can customize your backend setups.

We’re happy to announce that the v1.11 release includes the public alpha of the new Backstage backend system! The system has already been available to use for some time, as some of you have already found, but this alpha release marks the point where we are finally ready to encourage widespread adoption by plugin builders. We still don’t recommend that you use this new system in your production setups just yet, more on that later.

Okay, everyone. Time to move on from all the 2022 reflections, Top 10 lists, and Wrapped(s), and turn our gaze in the other direction — towards 2023. As the Backstage team moves into the new year, we find ourselves asking those perennial questions: How can we continue to grow and enhance the Backstage community? How can we improve the experience for those adopting Backstage? How can we give the best support to Backstage contributors?

At the heart of Backstage is the Backstage Software Catalog, which is a data store that allows an organization to centralize and visualize its many software services and components. Backstage inspects and transforms an organization's disparate software services and parts into a centralized data store. This blog post introduces the concept of incremental entity providers, which allow Backstage to scale ingestion to even larger datasets.

If 2021 was the year of growth for the Backstage project and community, 2022 can be easily defined as the year of maturity. Both the project and the community continued to grow at an incredible pace and the platform is now more stable, more secure, and more powerful than ever.

Our community is full of people from across the globe who bring incredible engagement and positive vibes to the project. And we finally got to experience this for the first time in real life during BackstageCon, the very first in-person conference fully dedicated to Backstage, where hundreds of enthusiasts, the maintainers, adopters, and partners joined the event confirming the great momentum and the traction in the market.

But before anticipating too much, let’s share some stats of this amazing 2022.

Backstage continues to grow in popularity and maturity, with industry leaders not only adopting the framework but actively participating in the community through contributions and commercial offerings. One of the most recent contributions comes from the Linux Foundation, launching an introductory course aimed at DevOps engineers or professionals working on Developer Productivity or Developer Experience. The course is available for free on edX, with a paid option for the certified track.

ICYMI: BackstageCon & KubeCon NA 2022 Recap​

What an action-packed and memorable week for the Backstage community meeting up IRL at KubeCon North America 2022 in (unseasonably warm and sunny) Detroit. Let’s see what the community was up to:

BackstageCon: A full day of nothing but Backstage​

We started the week off strong, packing a ballroom for BackstageCon on Monday. It was a smorgasbord of some of our active community members at the first official Backstage conference — as well as some new faces interested in learning more about Backstage! To welcome us, Roadie’s Martina Iglesias Fernandez and Spotify’s Suzanne Daniels took center stage. Next up, we listened to three keynotes from the event’s top sponsors: Roadie’s David Tuite enlightened us on how to 10x developer effectiveness for teams, Dave Zolotusky from Spotify discussed developer happiness and announced that Spotify Plugins for Backstage are launching soon, and Valentina Alaria from VMware Tanzu talked about how to curate the Backstage experience to enable developer velocity. In between some creative snacks (lemon blueberry popcorn, anyone?) and coffee breaks, we heard from adopters including Telus, DAZN, HP, US Bank, and more on lessons learned through their adoption journeys, we talked about different ways to leverage data within Backstage, and we discussed new ways to customize Backstage for specific adopter needs.

You can watch all the BackstageCon sessions, talks, and keynotes here!

Project Meeting: Building a better Backstage together​

The following day, the Backstage maintainers hosted a lively project meeting, where we engaged with a lot of folks that had been at BackstageCon the day before. Over the course of the meeting, the Backstage community talked through recommended approaches for maintaining your Software Catalog as a source of truth, sourcing internal contributors for organization’s Backstage apps, improving frontend performance in a few plugins, how Backstage maintainers work, and appreciation for the contributions from our community. You can read more detailed notes from the project meeting in the repo here.

KubeCon: Demos, swag, and standing-room only​

And last but not least: three days of KubeCon North America! At KubeCon, the Backstage team met and greeted so many new faces at our kiosk in the Project Pavilion. We ran demos, answered questions, and handed out lots and lots of SWAG!

Spotify’s Francesco Corti and core maintainer Ben Lambert took the stage on Wednesday to present the Backstage maintainer talk to a PACKED audience. They discussed how core features of Backstage are changing the way end-user developers interact and manage their ecosystem, and encouraged folks to create the future of developer experience with the rest of the Backstage community. If you missed it, no worries! Their talk track will be posted on the CNCF YouTube channel.

…and that’s a wrap! What an incredible week. Our growing Backstage community continues to amaze us with its dedication and enthusiasm. We can’t wait to see you all again at KubeCon Europe in The Netherlands! In fact, we’d love to see our adopters give Backstage talks next year (hint, hint). The KubeCon Europe CFP is open until Friday, November 18, 2022.

TL;DR If you didn't know, now you know: the Backstage plugin analytics API is here to help you understand how developers in your organization are using Backstage.

TL;DR Backstage’s security posture continues to mature! Today, we’re releasing a report from an independent security audit and the first version of the Backstage Threat Model.

As an Incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Backstage was fortunate enough to take advantage of a sponsored security audit. The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) sponsored the audit as part of its ongoing efforts to secure the open source software ecosystem, and the audit itself was performed by X41 D-Sec. Our goal with the audit was to evaluate and improve Backstage’s security posture, focusing on the core Backstage framework and plugins.