Roadie Local: Self-hosted Backstage, ready in minutes

💈 Introducing Roadie Local (currently in beta)

Over the years the ability to self-host Roadie has come up time and again.

Platform teams for security-conscious, government-facing, or generally pro-self-hosting would often approach us about using Roadie but were blocked. They couldn’t access all the Roadie goodies that our SaaS customers know and love, like scorecards, RBAC, and a no-code UI for crafting entity pages and enabling plugins.

Even folks who simply wanted to spin up a quick PoC of Backstage would approach us and ask if we could help. There isn’t a default image for running Backstage and it can be tricky to even stand up an instance, let alone craft a version of Backstage that reaches parity with proprietary offerings like Cortex or Port in a PoC timeframe.

All that’s changing.

We’re launching self-hosted Roadie.

We call it Roadie Local.

• You’ll be able to self-host it.
• You’ll be able to use it for free (for less than 15 users).
• And it’s currently in beta.

Why self-host Roadie?

Running Roadie in a security-conscious system

Maybe you’re a government department, defense contractor, high-frequency trading firm, or simply an organization that takes security very, very seriously: you need the software you use to be on-prem or at the very least hosted in your cloud account.

Roadie Local is that. We’re even working on an air-gapped solution.

Spinning up Backstage, fast

Early in the cycle of adopting an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) like Roadie or Backstage you want to kick the tires and test things out. In fact, you’re usually testing a whole bunch of different IDPs to understand the market and what each one offers. From completely open-source offerings like Backstage, proprietary offerings like Cortex or Port, and hybrid open-source-but-with-support-and-some-nice-features like Roadie.

Spinning up Backstage for these kinds of PoCs usually took a bit of time though, and you don’t necessarily get to feature parity with the proprietary offerings in the time allotted.

With Roadie Local you can stand up a best-in-class IDP, based on open-source Backstage, in minutes.

Migrating from Self-hosted Backstage

Migrating from self-hosting Backstage to Roadie is now a well-trodden path, but the act of switching is still non-trivial. That is often because of the snags from moving to SaaS. Moving from self-hosting Backstage to self-hosting Roadie is a much simpler adoption path.

How it works

We’ve tried to keep it simple:

• You request a license key
• We give you a license key
• You pull the Roadie Local image and install it
• You have a local version of Roadie

That’s abstracted a little 👆, but not much.

What’s in the box?

In essence, everything that you know and love now as well as everything we’re building for the SaaS version of Roadie. There will be no meaningful difference in terms of feature availability.

That means:

• A composed and polished version of Backstage that you can configure both in the UI and with file-based config options for added flexibility.
• All the usability and quality of life improvements that we’ve built over the years, like no-code page editing and no-YAML ways to add catalog data.
• 70+ plugins to help you get going on Day 1.
• Scorecards that let you document and enforce engineering standards.
• And built-in RBAC to control who sees what and who can trigger certain actions.

The best part? Roadie Local is free for less than 15 contributing users.

We’ve never had a fully free tier for Roadie.

We offer 30-day free trials of the SaaS product but the costs of running a full, isolated Backstage stack for each SaaS tenant we have meant that the economics never worked out for us to offer Roadie to smaller teams, en masse, for free.

The economics are different for Roadie Local, so we get to be different.

Roadie Local will be free for <15 contributing users*.

• What’s a Contributing User? Someone who has committed code to a piece of software tracked in the Catalog in the last 3 months.

If you’re playing around or running a quick Proof of Concept, then it’s free.

If you’re a smaller team and you have 10 engineers, then it’s free.

Simple.

What’s next

We don’t like to spend long in beta, so expect Roadie Local to reach general availability in Spring 2025.

We’re targeting BackstageCon EU in April 2025 for a big, ol’ fashioned product launch.

And then?

In short, deployment options:

• Helm charts
• Images and deployment options available on the AWS, Azure, and GCP Marketplaces
• Other, non-Kubernetes, non-cloud provider-based deployment options