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v1.9.0

These are the release notes for the v1.9.0 release of Backstage.

A huge thanks to the whole team of maintainers and contributors as well as the amazing Backstage Community for the hard work in getting this release developed and done.

Highlights​

Catalog Batch Fetching​

The catalog client has a new getEntitiesByRefs method, and the catalog backend has a corresponding new /entities/by-refs endpoint. These allow for the efficient batch fetching of entities by their refs, which may be useful e.g. in GraphQL resolvers or similar contexts where you need to fetch large numbers of entities at the same time.

New plugin: AWS Credentials Provider​

The management of AWS credentials in the backend saw some significant improvement, through the introduction of the @backstage/integration-aws-node package and its corresponding AwsCredentialsManager interface. This is leveraged e.g. in the TechDocs S3 publisher.

Contributed by @clareliguori in #14125

Events​

There was further work to advance the events backend functionality, which propagates and processes events such as webhooks. It has modules for AWS SQS, Azure, Bitbucket Cloud, Gerrit, GitHub, and Gitlab, along with other improvements.

Contributed by @pjungermann and others in the community.

New Plugin: Incremental Ingestion​

Introduces incremental entity providers, which are used for streaming very large data sources into the catalog.

Contributed by @dekoding #14356

Scaffolder Custom Field Explorer​

The new custom field explorer lets you view and play around with available installed custom field extensions.

Contributed by @kuangp in #14008

Scaffolder concurrent task execution​

Individual Scaffolder task workers can now run multiple (defaults to 10) tasks concurrently using the concurrentTasksLimit option, leading to more efficient resource usage.

Contributed by @howlowck in #13817

Deprecating Catalog Prometheus metrics for OpenTelemetry​

We have started working on phasing out the Prometheus Metrics exposed using the prom-client in favor of replacement metrics using OpenTelemetery. The prom-client metrics have always been a band-aid and never fully established but we want to notify existing users of their future removal. Backstage does not provide any default exporter or instructions on how to export the new metrics yet but you should expect documentation shortly. We hope to fully incorporate OpenTelemetry into other plugins once we gain confidence and establish patterns. Added in #15145.

Updated API for createApp​

The getProvider and getRouter methods of the main app instance from @backstage/core-app-api have been deprecated. Instead, there is now an AppRouter component that is a drop-in replacement for the router, and a new createRoot method for creating the root app component. This change will simplify the internal logic of the app, and also makes it more clear that the app is created from a React element tree.

Advancements on the New Backend System​

Work has progressed with the new system and we have been able to add a couple of new features, most notable are shutdown lifecycle events and stop functionality to the Backend.

All core service references are now exported via a single coreServices object. For example, the loggerServiceRef is now accessed via coreServices.logger instead, #14986. All service interfaces are now suffixed with *Service. Root scoped services are now always initialized, whether they are depended directly on by others or not; this allows features such as the metrics exporter to work correctly.

New package: @backstage/repo-tools​

This new package is part of an ongoing effort to make more of the repository tooling in the main Backstage repository available to the rest of the community. The main piece that has been added so far is the tooling needed to use API reports.

Security Fixes​

This release does not contain any security fixes.

Upgrade path​

We recommend that you keep your Backstage project up to date with this latest release. For more guidance on how to upgrade, check out the documentation for keeping Backstage updated.

Below you can find a list of links and references to help you learn about and start using this new release.

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