Backstage Weekly 95 - Measuring Catalog correctness, Saxo Bank interview

Hi y’all! This might be the last time I write this newsletter, but you’ll still see me around, especially if you attend BackstageCon in Chicago!

• New article: Measuring Catalog correctness
• Project updates: Scaffolder and the New Backend System are grown-ups now
• New interview: Platforms at Saxo Bank with Jinhong and Per
• New plugin: Pulumi

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.

In my latest article, I share a few ideas on how to leverage Tech Insights to do that. It’s fresh off the press, check it out!

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!

The New Backend System is ready and will be the default

As announced with Backstage 1.18, after months of non-stop dedication from maintainers and the community, the New Backstage System is ready to use. In fact, the default exports in all backend packages will be pointing to the New Backend System modules.

The default exports for The New Backend System can enable automatic feature discovery and let you make dynamic one-line imports in your code. Find more details in the release notes.

Scaffolder to become a project area

I’m personally a big fan of Backstage’s Scaffolder, and I think it could be a great starting point for new adopters. It’s exciting to see software templates become an incubating project area within Backstage. This means ownership will be shared with more contributors, leading to greater collaboration.

The newly minted owners of the Scaffolder project area are the one and only Paul Cowan (dagda1) and Backstage regular Bogdan Nechyporenko (acierto). It’s exciting to see the team coming together to Scaffold the Scaffolder upwards!

Interview: A Platform made out of platforms

I had the privilege of interviewing Jinhong Brejnholt, Chief Cloud Architect at Saxo Bank, and Per Hedegaard, Chief Container Platform Engineer at Saxo Bank about their platform. Their office in Copenhagen is stunning and has the largest private art collection in Denmark—made me wanna move back!

Most importantly, Jinhong and Per were buzzing with excellent ideas around Platform Engineering and were very generous in sharing their insights. Watch the interview now!

New plugin: Pulumi

Pulumi just shipped a new plugin for Backstage. Using the Pulumi plugin, you can create a new Pulumi project from an organization template stored in Pulumi, run previews and updates, and run and view Deployments. The plugin provides Scaffolder templates that you can make your own. Read more in their release notes.