Backstage Weekly 53 - New Backstage 1.5 is out!

Hi, y’all! The new Backstage is out! Upgrade to 1.5 to use the new GithHub Entity provider, try out the experimental plugin reconfiguration and backend system evolution, and profit from three recent plugins.

Switch to Entity Providers

Backstage 1.5 includes a GitHub Entity Provider (as well as the other four Entity Providers we overviewed last week) for you to discover and ingest entities from your GitHub organization.

You would formerly use Discover Processors for this purpose, but they would all run together as part of the processing loop. You still can use them, but Entity Providers are the recommended way to go from now on because they let you decide how to trigger updates.

Using managed Backstage lets you focus on building value for your team instead of learning internals and upgrading your instance. Try out Roadie Backstage for free.

Try out experimental features

This releases ships experimental support for plugin reconfiguration and the backend system evolution. Although the features are not recommended for production, trying them out is valuable for the team in charge to refine them based on your feedback. Let’s take a look

• Plugin reconfiguration lets you re-define labels, icons, and elements, as well as replace components from a plugin in your instance. Check out the documentation for what this means for plugin developers and instance developers.
• Backend System evolution is an initiative to re-structure how plugins interact with each other in order to simplify installations and improve extensions. Check out our review in a previous edition.

New plugins

Backstage 1.5 shipped with three new plugins. For regular readers, a few of them may sound familiar:

• GitHub issues plugin lets you bring your repo’s issues to card on its associated entities.
• New SonarQube plugin lets you display code statistics from your SonarQube instance(s).
• AWS Proton plugin lets you scaffold software templates using AWS Proton.

Before saying good bye, I want to welcome Paraná Banco to the community as the most recent adopter!

Talk to you next week!

Jorge L