Blog

Improving Search, some mobile UX tweaks, and Tech Insights historical data ingestion

April was all about getting data in and out of the Catalog. We improved search by introducing a new search engine, tweaked the mobile UX of Roadie to make it more usable (at 4am when you need to grab some techdocs for an incident), and extended the limits on historical data ingestion for Tech Insights. Oh, and introduced the DX plugin to make syncing data between DX <> Roadie easier. A busy month.

Entering the Danger Zone: Multiple Software Catalogs

Developer tooling often requires service catalogs to scope the data that is created within them, especially when that tooling relates to every piece of software created by your organization. Because of this, you often end up with multiple different service catalogs for services you’re brought. Roadie (and Backstage more broadly) can help.

An all new (paginated) Catalog, the All Tab, and changes to the Admin area

Pagination and Catalog filtering labs, the All tab has arrived to make the Catalog even more composable, and the Admin area is getting a glam-up.

From Day 0 to Day 2 - a Guide to Planning and Implementing Backstage

Backstage is powerful, but getting it right takes work. We break down the Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 journey of implementing Backstage, covering the planning, deployment, and long-term maintenance challenges that teams face. From the hidden complexities of catalog population to the skill gaps in platform teams, we explore what it really takes to make Backstage successful.

Introducing: the Wiz plugin for Backstage

Wiz helps engineering teams stay on top of security risks, but flipping between tools to check vulnerabilities slows everything down. With the new Wiz Plugin for Backstage, teams can see their security insights right alongside their services, documentation, and pipelines - no extra steps required!

Roadie BTS: Running Backstage at Scale

Backstage is powerful, but like any application, keeping it stable at scale can be a challenge. Memory leaks, unnecessary restarts, and background jobs interfering with performance can slowly erode reliability - until they become major headaches. At Roadie, we’ve been making deep, structural improvements to eliminate these issues, ensuring a smoother, more resilient experience for platform teams. Here’s how the Roadie engineering team tackled hidden performance pitfalls and made Backstage run better than ever.

Roadie Local: Self-hosted Backstage, ready in minutes

Roadie has been SaaS-only since it was founded, but the times they are a changin'. A locally runnable and deployable version of Roadie is on its way and now in beta.

Roadie Local is coming, State of Backstage launches, and Announcements lands

This month we're announcing our newest venture: on-prem Roadie, as well as a new community initiative, and the addition of announcements capability to the product.

State of Backstage Launches!

Deploying Backstage is just the beginning. The real challenge is turning it into a tool your developers rely on. Successful adoption requires treating Backstage like a product, aligning it with workflows, and fostering collaboration. Discover how to sustain adoption through strategic planning, automation, and creating meaningful value for your teams.

Backstage Adoption: The Day 2 Problem

Deploying Backstage is just the beginning. The real challenge is turning it into a tool your developers rely on. Successful adoption requires treating Backstage like a product, aligning it with workflows, and fostering collaboration. Discover how to sustain adoption through strategic planning, automation, and creating meaningful value for your teams.

Performance, pagination, new Tech Insights visualisations, GHES support and Wiz certification

This is another bumper changelog that covers November and December: buckle up. The new year is upon us and we're covering all things performance related, as well as enhancements to our support for GitHub Enterprise Server and the security service Wiz. Oh, and a new way to visualise Tech Insights Fact Data to make it more seamlessly integrated into the Catalog.

What to think about when you’re thinking about an IDP

Thinking about implementing an IDP? Here’s what we think you should be thinking about. From tackling discoverability issues and enabling self-service environments, to streamlining the developer experience and leveraging insights, we explore how to think about the things that actually matter when you're planning out your IDP implementation.

Roadie is now live on AWS Marketplace

Roadie is now available on AWS Marketplace, making it easier than ever before to start your Backstage journey.

Backstage Alternatives

Backstage isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay - for some software engineering teams Backstage may just not be a good fit. From small teams that thrive on shared knowledge and simplicity, to organizations with clean, modern tech stacks that don’t face legacy complexity, we break down where Backstage might not shine. Plus, we highlight Backstage alternatives that can meet your needs until size, scale or complexity demand a more robust solution.

The Backstage Scaffolder, a Powerful New Orchestration Tool

Curious about the Backstage Scaffolder? We take a look at what you can do with this powerful tool as well as some of its limitations in comparison to its rivals.

Backstage: How much does it really cost?

Backstage promises a low-cost, open-source solution for building an Internal Developer Portal, but the true true cost of ownership can be surprisingly high. We explore how hidden costs like setup, customization, and ongoing maintenance often make Backstage more complex and costly than you may think...

Wrap up: BackstageCon & KubeCon North America 2024

BackstageCon & KubeCon North America 2024 was a riot, but what happened? What did we learn? And which sessions should you catchup on via the CNCF YouTube channel?

Understanding the Backstage System Model

How does the Backstage System Model actually work? How can you use it to create a structured, flexible Catalog? How do you make sure you can both model how your organisation thinks and speaks, without locking yourself into the same model forever?

Why Hybrid is Best for IDPs

Discover why the hybrid model for Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) offers the best of both worlds. We explore the pros and cons of open-source, proprietary, and hybrid IDPs, ultimately revealing how hybrid solutions like Roadie combine the extensibility and community support of open-source with the ease of use and quick deployment of proprietary options.

RBAC, the new Backend, Scaling, Notifications and new Catalog customisation options

This is a bumper changelog that covers September and October, so buckle up. The clocks have rolled back, Halloween is upon us, and it's time to wrap up what we've been working on for the last two months. We're got RBAC, the new Backend, Notifications, scaling improvements, custom columns and tables, and a whole raft of plugins.

The Adoption Journey - Initiatives and Strategies

Part of the Backstage Adoption series, this post lays out two broad categories of proven initiatives and tactics that can be used to drive adoption of Backstage in your organisation.

Improving and Measuring Developer Experience with Backstage

Tracking and measuring developer experience is crucial for driving efficiency and productivity as your organization grows. We explore two effective approaches to aggregating DX metrics, either through third-party tools or natively within Backstage using Tech Insights, helping you make informed decisions to optimize your development workflows.

Migrating to Backstage’s New Backend: A Step-By-Step Guide

Thinking about upgrading to Backstage’s new backend system? Check out our comprehensive guide that walks you through a minimal-disruption migration. Learn how to prepare your environment, use the legacy plugin bridge for existing plugins, and smoothly transition to the modern architecture. We'll help you navigate this migration so you can unlock improved scalability, efficiency, and set the stage for future development.

The Power of Customization: Making Backstage Work for You with Roadie

Every engineering organization is unique, and your Internal Developer Portal should reflect that. Roadie builds on Backstage’s flexibility, and makes it much easier for teams to customize their developer portal to match their tools, culture, and workflows. From theming and UI tweaks, to custom data models, entity providers, and plugins, learn how Roadie combines ease-of-use with extensive customization.

Backstage and Cost Insights: shifting cloud costs left

As cloud costs grow, organizations are finding that empowering engineers to take ownership of cloud spend and to optimize it as part of the development process leads to more efficient resource usage. We investigate the growing phenomenon of shifting cost awareness left and how it helps teams take ownership of cloud spend and make proactive decisions to optimize efficiency and delivery.

The Ultimate Guide to Backstage Software Catalog Completeness

Filling the catalog of your Internal Developer Portal doesn't need to be an insurmountable task. We've collected 3 strategies you can leverage and 12 individual tactics that our customers have used to reach 90% catalog completeness or higher.

Adopting Backstage - Documentation and Support

Backstage a smoother experience for your team and boost adoption by creating effective internal getting started documentation and support channels.

How to Define Engineering Standards

Engineering standards ensure consistency, reliability, and quality across projects and teams. Defining these standards can be tricky, but that is only half the battle. To make them effective standards must be adhered to. They need to be broken down into bitesized, actionable chunks.

Easier Relationship Mapping in the Backstage Catalog

How to make adding relationships between entities easier for everyone in the Backstage catalog.

Improving Backstage performance (by up to 48x)

Unlock the full potential of Backstage with our guide to optimizing its Catalog performance. Whether you're building a custom internal developer portal or scaling your Backstage deployment, this article provides the crucial insights you need to avoid common performance pitfalls.

Update the Backstage catalog instantly without touching any YAML

How to make updating entities in your Backstage catalog painless and quick, and unlock large scale scripted updates via API.

How to customize Backstage Kinds and Types without getting in trouble

Exploring some of the categorisation issues organisations may come up against when trying to add new entities to the Backstage catalog, and possible solutions.

Scaling Backstage

The Backstage developer portal is an excellent tool for platform teams, as well as engineers, to keep a handle on their software, maintain compliance statuses and spin up new services. Unfortunately the open source Backstage is known for its difficult set up time and overall cumbersome maintainability. There are multiple challenges that arise when the volume of data in the Backstage grows to 1,000s and 10,000s of entities, ranging from performance to ease of use.

Solving the Day 2 Problem with Backstage

As organizations strive to innovate and deploy new features rapidly, they often encounter a significant hurdle known as the "Day 2 problem." This term refers to the challenges that arise after the initial deployment of software, including maintenance, scalability, and observability. Roadie, leveraging the power of Backstage, is here to address these issues head-on.

Towards a more flexible software catalog

Summer is a productive time at Roadie. We've been working a lot to build more flexibility into the Backstage data model and UI. This month we're rolling out custom catalog columns and wider relationship support between elements of the software catalog. We've also revamped how we pull data in, starting with the AWS provider.

Role-based access control in Roadie

Role-based access control and user management is now available in Roadie, with role management, user management and fine-grain control over the catalog, scaffolder and Tech Insights 🎉 as well as the upgrade to 1.26 and new plugins and integrations.

Customising the Roadie UI

Customisations of the sidebar and the Catalog UI have arrived 🎉 as part of a whole suite of tools UI tweaks and tools designed to reduce the cognitive load for users as your catalog grows.

A more customisable Scaffolder

Extensions to the Scaffolder UI and Custom Actions for Templates have arrived 🎉 as part of a whole suite of tools designed to help get more value from automation within Roadie. We've also added the Dynatrace Plugin and adopted the all new, super-shiny PagerDuty plugin.

Repositories have come to the Catalog

Repositories have come to the Catalog (in beta) 🎉 as part of a whole suite of tools designed to help get to a complete catalog. We also have an AWS Resource Provider and new Catalog editing tools. We've also added the End of Life Plugin (both frontend and backend parts) to allow for some neat visualisation of deprecation information.

The Roadie API is now live and scorecards have come to the Catalog

The Roadie API is now live for all users on our Growth Plan 🎉. You can use it to push entities to the catalog, dry-run the scaffolder and interrogate TechInsights scorecards. We've also added Scorecards to the Catalog, excluding facts is now possible when creating TechInsights checks, expanded the use of decorators, upgraded to Backstage 1.21 and added a few new plugins.

Rollups for Tech Insights

Rollups aggregate Scorecard and Check data by team and department, up and down your organisational hierarchy, and let you add scorecard information to teams in the catalog.

Measuring Catalog Correctness and completeness

A Catalog with rich information for every software asset in your organization is the ultimate dream. But you won’t get there in a day. Thus, you need a way to track your progress toward Catalog correctness and completeness.

Live custom Backstage plugins within seconds

Develop custom plugins with a live preview within Roadie Backstage, and deploy them to production in seconds with the Roadie CLI.

Our First 12 Month SOC2 Type 2 Report

We're very excited to say that we just gained our first 12 Month SOC2 Type 2 Report! This report is a big deal for us and shows just how dedicated we are to keeping your data secure and private.

Decorators for rich Team pages

Today we released a feature we call Decorators. Decorators allow you to easily add metadata to the stuff you track in your Roadie Backstage catalog. This metadata is stored within Roadie, and not written to YAML.

New Catalog UI, certified templates, more tutorials

This month we're rolling out a huge visual update to the catalog with much more space to get your work done. We've also got a bunch of new Tech Insights tutorials to help you improve software across your org.

Backstage Gets Quality and Compliance Scorecards with Roadie

Roadie, the no-code Backstage Developer Portal, is launching Tech Insights to help organizations track software quality, security and compliance

Using Backstage’s Scaffolder to Fill up your Catalog

Make software onboarding a one-click experience in your Dev Portal and boost your adoption rate. Here's a step-by-step tutorial for that.

Backstage Users Unconference: a wrap-up

Last week we had a blast hosting the 4th Backstage Users Unconference! Over 95 people showed up to share how they’re using Backstage and brainstorm solutions to common problems.

Roadie is sponsoring "Unpacked": The Ultimate Virtual DevOps Conference

We are thrilled to announce that Roadie is sponsoring the first-ever "Unpacked." This virtual conference, hosted by Cloudsmith, promises to bring together DevOps professionals and engineering leaders worldwide.

Backstage during KubeCon EU ‘23

Backstage was undoubtedly one of the recurring topics of the conference, with at least five talks dedicated to the framework and several others referencing it. As you walked through the busy venue, it was common to pick up people mentioning “Backstage” as you rushed through the busy venue.

Roadie mentioned in The Pragmatic Engineer

At a readership of 160k+ tech professionals, The Pragmatic Engineer has received a lot of praise from the enterprise software and scale-ups industry. For their column on Backstage, the Roadie team had the opportunity of contributing our experiences with Gergely Orosz.

New in Roadie: Automated language tagging for GitHub entities

Roadie can now automatically bring this information from GitHub and associate the corresponding languages to your entities through a tag or a label, depending on your preference.

Incident Management in your Backstage Developer Portal

Backstage has a handful of plugins that integrate incident managers into your Internal Developer Portal. In this post, you'll get an overview of each of them, including what they do.

Roadie customers are not affected by Backstage’s RCE vulnerability

Last week, the Oxeye research team published a report of a vulnerability found in Backstage caused by an outdated vm2 third-party library. Roadie customers are unaffected by this vulnerability because their instances are upgraded regularly (currently at v1.8) and due to extra security measures in the Scaffolder implemented in Roadie from the beginning.

Backstage consolidating its role in the Cloud native ecosystem

At the moment, Thoughtworks, Red Hat, Gartner, VMWare, and the Linux Foundation endorse Backstage as a viable solution for improving the developer experience of growing engineering teams through a Developer Portal.

Wrap up: BackstageCon and KubeCon NA 2022

Backstage made its way to the center stage last week in Detroit, as maintainers, contributors, and adopters deepened their relationship and shared their excitement about the framework with the wider Cloud Native community.

Roadie.io is boosting Backstage Developer Portals for Scale-Ups with Scorecards

Roadie.io, the company offering a CNCF Backstage SaaS option, is extending the most popular Developer Portal framework by introducing Tech Insights.

Roadie now keeps the catalog in sync with your GitHub with the webhooks API!

As a Roadie user, editing a Backstage YAML file in your GitHub repo will result in those changes almost immediately appearing in your Catalog. Our team designed and implemented a GitHub integration based on webhooks to replace the default poll-based discovery shipped in Backstage.

Measuring and Improving Software Quality with Roadie Backstage

Improve software quality and set minimum standards in your engineering organization with Roadie's new Tech Insights feature. Coming soon.

Roadie Has Achieved SOC2 Type 2 Compliance

We have achieved SOC2 Type 2 compliance. We have a set of mature and robust security and availability practices at Roadie and wanted to validate them against industry standards. We see this achievement of SOC2 Type 2 compliance as a milestone in our ever-improving security journey.

Backstage Home plugin on Roadie

The Backstage Home plugin is now available to all Roadie Backstage users. Learn what it is, why it exists, and how to use it on Roadie.

The Backstage scaffolder is now generally available on Roadie

When we first launched hosted Backstage, we made the hard decision to disable the scaffolder for security reasons. Today we are launching a re-designed and hardened scaffolder architecture which is safe for Roadie customers to use.

Deploy a GitHub pages website with the Roadie Backstage scaffolder

Learn how to deploy a GitHub pages website from a predefined skeleton. The Backstage Scaffolder will automatically create a GitHub repo, fill it with templated code, call the GitHub API to enable GitHub pages and hook our new website to a monitoring tool.

10 reasons to get Backstage from Roadie

From getting started faster to growing adoption faster. We believe Roadie is the right choice for many companies. Here's why.

Roadie's response to recent log4j vulnerabilities

Roadie is not impacted by the log4j vulnerabilities, CVE-2021-44228 or CVE-2021-45046, also known as log4shell.

OAuth Token Exchange: AWS → GCP

How to exchange short lived tokens between AWS and GCP

How to model monorepos in Backstage

There are multiple different ways to represent monorepos in Backstage, each with its own setup, benefits and drawbacks. We show you how to do it in your situation.

Plugins migration to monorepo

Major change in the way we handle our plugins.

GitHub Apps - How to avoid leaking your customer’s source code with GitHub apps

How to avoid leaking your customer’s source code with GitHub apps.

Backstage TechDocs - How to embed lucid chart diagrams

TechDocs converts markdown files to Backstage docs so your engineering teams can find them and it is very useful. But how do we embed diagrams from lucid chart.

How to model software in Backstage

How to use Backstage concepts — components, APIs, systems and domains — to model software and represent the relationships between different pieces of code.

Developer portals are a superpower

A rebuttal of a post by AWS guru Corey Quinn, who claims that developer portals are an anti-pattern.

Backstage TechDocs - How it works

TechDocs converts markdown files to Backstage docs so your engineering teams can find them. But how does it work and how do you set it up?

Deploying Backstage application to AWS ECS Fargate

How to deploy Backstage to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) using the Fargate serverless computing engine to run Docker containers

How to deploy Backstage on KIND Kubernetes

How to build and run Backstage on a local Kubernetes cluster created with KIND.

Using GitHub Auth with Backstage

Setting up GitHub authentication can be a little tricky, but this post will tell you everything you need to know.

Running the Backstage service catalog with Docker Compose

How to build and run Backstage Docker containers to get started with the service catalog in Docker Compose.

How to use the Backstage Lighthouse plugin

The first plugin shipped by the Backstage team is a Lighthouse plugin. It allows you to track your website speed over time in Backstage.