Backstage Weekly 92 - TechDocs default plugins, OpenCost

Hi y’all! here’s this week’s round of Backstage news:

• New OpenCost plugin
• Techdocs: Specify default MkDocs plugins for all mkdocs.yaml files
• Migrating Auth to the New Backend System (help wanted!)

OpenCost in Backstage

OpenCost is a CNCF Sandbox project for Kubernetes cloud cost monitoring. mattray, the project manager, ported the existing OpenCost UI to Backstage with the goal of getting additional user feedback for features.

OpenCost supports AWS, Azure, GCP, on-premise, Alibaba, and Scaleway. It relies on Prometheus for scraping metrics and data storage.

To use this plugin, you’ll have to set up OpenCost. Installing the Backstage plugin is relatively straightforward, check out their post to get started.

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!

Default MkDocs plugins for TechDocs

You can support a variety of MkDocs plugins in your TechDocs. Normally, you’ll add support for these plugins in the TechDocs image used to build documentation. However, each of your users had to manually register the plugin in their mkdocs.yaml file.

Thanks to dschwank, you’ll be able to specify defaultPlugins in the TechDocs config file. This simplifies the usage as styling plugins can be added once for all users.

This feature is expected to land as part of the 1.18.0 release, scheduled for September 19th. View more details in the PR.

Auth modules migrating to the New Backend System

Rugvip championed the colossal refractor of the auth integration to use the New Backend System. The refractor moves out the sign-in logic away from the package itself to enable simplified APIs for registering providers. The plan is to gradually migrate all existing auth providers to use the new APIs.

There is now an Auth Backend Module Migrations drive to migrate all the existing providers. So far, GCP, GitHub, GitLab, and Google are already ported but there are a few others that you can help with.

Check out the issue to track which ones are migrated and where you can help.