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:

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.

TL;DR If you’ve been waiting for Backstage Search to come out of beta, we’re excited to announce that Backstage Search 1.0 is here!

We first released the Backstage Search Platform over a year ago. Backstage Search Platform is a search experience built for you, by you.

Backstage Search Platform makes it possible for you to search across your entire software ecosystem. With a Search platform that is customizable and extendable, you can identify your needs within your organization and set up search to solve these problems. Whether it is to search through the Software Catalog or technical documentation generated by the TechDocs plugin.

This blog post is co-authored by Eric Peterson (@iamEAP), Spotify.

TL;DR: Introducing the TechDocs Addon Framework — a way for us all to contribute and share additional features, TechDocs Addons, on top of the base docs-like-code experience.