This blog post is co-authored by Emma Indal (@emmaindal), Spotify.
TLDR; We’re excited to announce the arrival of homepage templates for Backstage. It can be intimidating to build up your own instance of Backstage, so we decided to make your life a bit easier by giving you an out-of-the-box homepage to hit the ground running. This template can be found in our Backstage Storybook, as well as future templates that we build.
What a year 2021 has been for the Backstage project and community. As the year comes to a close, we can look back at some of the happenings, the successes, and welcome all the newcomers to our growing community.
In a year that has had its fair share of ups and downs, this community has been something that has brought me so much in the support you provide each other, your eagerness, passion, and willingness to share. Thank you to all of you for creating such a great community, and welcome to everyone joining us. I can’t wait to meet you all and see what great things we can create together in the new year.
In 2021 we’ve seen the project and community grow in every dimension, reaching over 75 public adopters, over 500 contributors from around the world all bringing new ideas and perspectives. We’ve had so many of you sharing and demoing your hard work in our monthly community sessions, added new plugins, built new features and really started to see Backstage have an impact for engineering teams across so many of our users.
Now let’s hear from the maintainers and look at the stats!
We’re excited to celebrate an important milestone for the Backstage community: 50+ public adopters!
Before digging into why we believe this is so important, we want to send a huge “thank you” to all the Backstage adopters and contributors who have helped grow the Backstage community. First, to the publicly listed adopters as your visible support for the project excites others to learn more about Backstage. Second, to those non-listed adopters, many of whom still engage in the community via issues, comments, or code contributions. Thank you!
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.
