Backstage Weekly 41 - The Ultimate Guide to Backstage

This week, we published a 2,000+ word guide to Backstage.

The goal of the post is to give engineering management everything they need to understand the value of Backstage, in one place.

It explains what Backstage is, who’s using it, the problems is can help solve, the features it uses to do that and more. It also explains, at a high level, how to get Backstage into an engineering org.

Check it out here.

Merged recently

Here’s some cool stuff that’s been merged in the past week or so.

CI/CD statistics plugin

This plugin shows charts of CI/CD pipeline durations over time. It expects to be used on the Software Catalog entity page.

So far, the plugin doesn’t have any open-source integrations built, but hopefully the community can contribute bindings for GitHub Actions, Circle CI and other popular CI tools.

Once up and running, the plugin shows tons of interesting data like build status and build time over various date ranges.

This work is from Spotify engineer Gustaf Räntilä, who extracted this from an internal Backstage feature. See #8912 for more info. The screenshot is attributed to Gustaf.

Entity inspection dialog

PR number #9375 adds a new pane which shows detailed information about each Entity in the catalog. Amongst other things, it shows details such as the exact uid/etag, relations as a plain list, ancestry, colocated entities, and the raw catalog response data.

Props to Fredrik Adelöw for the cool video demo. Click the three-dots on the entity page to find this feature.