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.

TL;DR Today we are announcing the availability of the Backstage Service Catalog in alpha. This has been the community’s most requested feature. Even if the catalog is not ready for production yet, we think this release already demonstrates how Backstage can provide value for your company right out of the box. With your early input and feedback, we hope to create a stronger generally available product.

TL;DR Thanks to the help from the Backstage community, we’ve made excellent progress and are now moving into Phase 2 of Backstage — building out a Service Catalog and the surrounding systems that will help unify the tools you use to manage your software.

We released the open source version of Backstage a little less than two months ago, and have been thrilled to see so many people jumping in and contributing to the project in its early stages. We’re excited to see what the community can build together as we progress through each phase of Backstage.

Just a few weeks ago, we released our internal plugin for [Lighthouse website audits] as our first open source plugin, so the whole community could use it. Today, we’re excited to add a new plugin to that list — say hello to the [Tech Radar plugin]!

One of the great things about the open source community is once you put your work out there, you really never know where it might end up. That’s certainly the case here.

We wanted to make getting started with Backstage as easy as possible. Even though Backstage is still in the early phases of its development, we believe it is important for our users to get a feel for what Backstage really is.

We want users to be able to create their own version of Backstage quickly and easily, so that they can take advantage of all the infrastructure that we’ve built into it — and start exploring.

In this blog post we’ll look at what a Backstage app is and how to create one using our CLI.