Backstage Weekly 91 - New release (1.17), Zalando, dynamic plugins RFC

Hi y’all! My happy news of the day is that for the first time in decades, my country of origin, Guatemala, got a pro-democracy party elected despite many obstacles 🌱 With that said, let’s jump into Backstage news!

• New Backstage release: 1.17
• Zalando and Backstage: 30 plugins, 40k entities, thousands of happy Builders
• RFC: Dynamic backend plugins (with an open PR already) - weight in!

Backstage 1.17 is here!

In this release, the Backstage team and community are consolidating the APIs around the New Backend System while improving the capabilities of the existing features.

• The New Backend System is introducing breaking changes that pave the way toward a plugin installation that requires no code changes.
• You’ll be able to use OpenTelemetry on the Catalog to dig into the processing loop.
• In your scaffolder templates, you can now use an each iterable as part of your steps.
• If you use GKE, you can now ingest your clusters into the Catalog as Resources thanks to a new plugin.

There’s other cool stuff backed into this release, check out the Release notes for more details.

Want to start building on top of Backstage? Get a Roadie Backstage instance so you can start shipping features into your IDP without having to manage an instance. Get a demo now!

How Zalando is using Backstage to build its developer platform

Zalando, the renowned online fashion store, started working on its developer platform in 2021 with the idea of making it a daily go-to tool. By now, their Backstage-based portal, called Sunrise, hosts 41k entities and integrates 27 tools through 30 plugins.

In this article, Lacey and Arthur—the PM and EM, respectively, responsible for the project—candidly share their insights on working with Backstage to meet the goals of their platforms and provide some nice tips along the way. Check it out!

RFC: Dynamic backend plugins

I stumbled upon this RFC last week by RedHat’s davidfestal and it got me thinking. It’s an ambitious proposal and definitely in line with what everyone wants: a better experience managing plugins. However, there are other initiatives in this direction going on in parallel, such as the New Frontend System and the continuously evolving New Backend System.

There’s already an open PR that seeks to integrate some experimental APIs so the community can start getting a feel of what the RFC wants to achieve and how.

Please do check the proposal out and leave your thoughts so we can all grow the framework together.