TLDR: Another beta has landed! We continue to focus on improving the stability and scalability of Backstage while enhancing its functionality. Thanks to focused efforts from the TechDocs core team and community, we're happy to say that TechDocs — our docs-like-code solution for all the software in your catalog — is now, after Software Templates, the second core feature to graduate to beta.
TLDR; At a high level, Backstage performs three main jobs: Create, Manage, and Explore. Throughout the year, we’ve been focussed on improving the stability and scalability of these areas while enhancing the feature sets based upon requests from the community. Software Templates — which enable push-button deployments with all your standards and best practices built-in — is our first feature-complete release candidate to graduate to beta. Read on to learn how this release improves template customization and flexibility, as well as performance.
TLDR; The new Backstage Search is now available in alpha, ready for you to start building on. A total rethinking of the core search feature in Backstage, it’s more than just a box you type into — it’s a mini platform all by itself. With its composable frontend and extensible backend, you can design and build the search tool that suits your organization’s needs.
So, you don’t just get an improved out-of-the-box experience for searching whatever is in your software catalog. You can also add support for searching other sources, too. Customize it the way you want and you can search your catalog, your plugins and docs — and even external sources, like Stack Overflow and Confluence — all at once, all right inside Backstage.
With one query, your teams can find exactly what they’re looking for: anything and everything.
The Backstage community is growing! In just over a year, Backstage has gone from a few open source building blocks to a thriving platform used by engineering orgs with thousands of developers. But even with 30+ adopting companies and 400+ contributors, we are still in the very early stages of reaching the platform’s potential.
In order to grow Backstage further, Spotify is increasing the support we provide both adopters (the people integrating Backstage into their organizations) and contributors (the people building features and improving the code). The more companies that adopt Backstage, the more support the project gets, the stronger the platform becomes for everyone.
And while Spotify remains committed to maturing the Backstage platform — both as original creator and active maintainer — we also want to make room for the community to take greater ownership. Backstage may have started inside Spotify, but it belongs to all of you. So, we hope you join us in what’s next.
One of the greatest strengths of Backstage also presents a never-ending challenge: Backstage is highly customizable and allows you to easily build a unique developer portal suited to your organization’s needs. The downside of this flexibility is that it can be hard to know where to start. Backstage can do so many things — integrating every part of your tech infrastructure and developer experience — but if you set off building a developer portal without a plan, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the possibilities. To help you form your plan, this post will detail how Spotify came to design our internal portal and recommend potential models for you to use when designing and building your own.
TLDR; We’re rethinking the Kubernetes developer experience with a new feature: a Kubernetes monitoring tool that’s designed around the needs of service owners, not cluster admins. Now developers can easily check the health of their services no matter how or where those services are deployed — whether it’s on a local host for testing or in production on dozens of clusters around the world.
And since Backstage uses the native Kubernetes API, the feature works with whichever cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) or managed service (OpenShift, IBM Cloud, GKE, etc.) you already use.
2022-01 update: The stability is now replaced by the versioning policy.
TL;DR Backstage is heading out of alpha and moving onto the path to stable releases and an eventual version 1.0. As the community and ecosystem continue to grow at an increasing rate, we want to provide a solid foundation for everyone building things in, with, and around Backstage. So, today we’re introducing the Stability Index — a simple way to find out how likely (or unlikely) a specific package or plugin inside Backstage might be updated with major changes. By indicating the reliability of key features and APIs, this quick reference will help contributors and adopters better plan and coordinate their development efforts going forward.
How did Spotify save millions on cloud costs within a matter of months?? We made cost optimization just another part of the daily development process. Our newly open sourced Cost Insights plugin makes a team’s cloud costs visible — and actionable — right inside Backstage. So engineers can see the impact of their cloud usage (down to a product and resource level) and make optimizations wherever and whenever it makes sense. By managing cloud costs from the ground up, you can make smarter decisions that let you continue to build and scale quickly, without wasting resources.
Are we turning engineers into accountants? Nope, we’re just letting engineers do what they do best, in the place that feels natural to them: inside Backstage.
We are excited to launch the Backstage Design System, which includes a Figma UI kit, a rich set of reusable code components on Storybook, and Guidelines for designers and developers as they build plugins for Backstage.
Backstage has an ambitious goal: to provide engineers with the best possible developer experience.
A great developer experience leads to happy, creative, and productive engineers. Our belief is that engineers should not have to be experts in various infrastructure tools or disciplines (e.g., machine learning or backend) to be productive. Infrastructure should be abstracted away, so that developers can spend more cycles building and testing, quickly and safely. Backstage unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a streamlined development environment from end to end.
Now you may be thinking, “Yeah, sure, that sounds nice and all, but how does Backstage actually abstract away infrastructure?” The short answer: plugins.
