August is a time for summer holidays and beaches and getting vaguely sunburnt but in a nice way. Or, if you're Roadie folks: building AI tools for Backstage. This month we integrated some MCP server tools, pushed out API token permissions for everyone, made mass updates possible, and moved OpenSearch to GA.

AI cometh... In July we launched our MCP servers to help pull Roadie data into you LLM-powered IDEs and MCP Clients, took a step towards fully integrating RAG AI into Roadie Search, allowed customers to vibe code their own UIs and launched the Scheduler to improve transparency of the inner workings of Roadie. Oh, and updates to our Launch Darkly plugin.

We now expose functionality data and functionality from your Roadie instance to MCP clients which can remotely authenticate (i.e. IDEs like Cursor or VSCode with Copilot). All protected by the same API token system that guards the Roadie API and gated behind the same user permissions a user would normally have.

We're introducing search improvements (both in the underlying search engines we use as well as the UI), preparing the way for AI feature rollouts this summer, supporting more SCM combinations and beta testing Roadie Local. Oh, and the Rootly and Terraform plugins to enhance your developer portal.

We're diving deep into AI over the next few weeks, but we've also shipped a bunch of incredibly powerful plugins to help increase the ease of ingestion of resources into the Catalog. First and foremost: Kratix and Kubernetes/Crossplane.

April was all about getting data in and out of the Catalog. We improved search by introducing a new search engine, tweaked the mobile UX of Roadie to make it more usable (at 4am when you need to grab some techdocs for an incident), and extended the limits on historical data ingestion for Tech Insights. Oh, and introduced the DX plugin to make syncing data between DX <> Roadie easier. A busy month.

Pagination and Catalog filtering labs, the All tab has arrived to make the Catalog even more composable, and the Admin area is getting a glam-up.

This month we're announcing our newest venture: on-prem Roadie, as well as a new community initiative, and the addition of announcements capability to the product.

This is another bumper changelog that covers November and December: buckle up. The new year is upon us and we're covering all things performance related, as well as enhancements to our support for GitHub Enterprise Server and the security service Wiz. Oh, and a new way to visualise Tech Insights Fact Data to make it more seamlessly integrated into the Catalog.

This is a bumper changelog that covers September and October, so buckle up. The clocks have rolled back, Halloween is upon us, and it's time to wrap up what we've been working on for the last two months. We're got RBAC, the new Backend, Notifications, scaling improvements, custom columns and tables, and a whole raft of plugins.

Summer is a productive time at Roadie. We've been working a lot to build more flexibility into the Backstage data model and UI. This month we're rolling out custom catalog columns and wider relationship support between elements of the software catalog. We've also revamped how we pull data in, starting with the AWS provider.

Role-based access control and user management is now available in Roadie, with role management, user management and fine-grain control over the catalog, scaffolder and Tech Insights 🎉 as well as the upgrade to 1.26 and new plugins and integrations.

Customisations of the sidebar and the Catalog UI have arrived 🎉 as part of a whole suite of tools UI tweaks and tools designed to reduce the cognitive load for users as your catalog grows.

Extensions to the Scaffolder UI and Custom Actions for Templates have arrived 🎉 as part of a whole suite of tools designed to help get more value from automation within Roadie. We've also added the Dynatrace Plugin and adopted the all new, super-shiny PagerDuty plugin.

Repositories have come to the Catalog (in beta) 🎉 as part of a whole suite of tools designed to help get to a complete catalog. We also have an AWS Resource Provider and new Catalog editing tools. We've also added the End of Life Plugin (both frontend and backend parts) to allow for some neat visualisation of deprecation information.

The Roadie API is now live for all users on our Growth Plan 🎉. You can use it to push entities to the catalog, dry-run the scaffolder and interrogate TechInsights scorecards. We've also added Scorecards to the Catalog, excluding facts is now possible when creating TechInsights checks, expanded the use of decorators, upgraded to Backstage 1.21 and added a few new plugins.

Rollups aggregate Scorecard and Check data by team and department, up and down your organisational hierarchy, and let you add scorecard information to teams in the catalog.

Develop custom plugins with a live preview within Roadie Backstage, and deploy them to production in seconds with the Roadie CLI.

Today we released a feature we call Decorators. Decorators allow you to easily add metadata to the stuff you track in your Roadie Backstage catalog. This metadata is stored within Roadie, and not written to YAML.

This month we're rolling out a huge visual update to the catalog with much more space to get your work done. We've also got a bunch of new Tech Insights tutorials to help you improve software across your org.