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.

TL;DR The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced that Backstage can begin incubating as an early stage project in the CNCF Sandbox. Released open source in March, the platform is built around an advanced service catalog and is designed to streamline software development from end to end.

Since we open sourced Backstage, one of the most requested features has been for a technical documentation plugin. Well, good news. The first open source version of TechDocs is here. Now let’s start collaborating and making it better, together.

TL;DR Today we are announcing a new Backstage feature: Software Templates. Simplify setup, standardize tooling, and deploy with the click of a button. Using automated templates, your engineers can spin up a new microservice, website, or other software component with your organization’s best practices built-in, right from the start.

Getting authentication right is important. It helps keep your platform safe, it’s one of the first things users will interact with, and there are many different authentication providers to support. To this end, we chose to use Passport to provide an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box experience that can be extended to your own, pre-existing authentication providers (known as strategies). The Auth APIs in Backstage serve two purposes: identify the user and provide a way for plugins to request access to third-party services on behalf of the user. We’ve already implemented Google and GitHub authentication to provide examples and to get you started.