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.

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.