Backstage 1.0: Developer Portal General Availability

Introduction

Backstage 1.0, released on June 25, 2022, marks a major milestone for Spotify’s open-source developer portal. This release achieves General Availability with enhanced plugin ecosystem, improved Kubernetes integration, and better developer experience for platform teams building internal developer portals.

Backstage becomes most valuable when your organization’s “how do I ship?” knowledge is scattered across wikis, dashboards, and tribal memory. A mature portal is about creating a single place for ownership, docs, and golden paths—especially when Kubernetes is the runtime but not everyone should have to think in YAML to deliver software.

Enhanced Plugin Ecosystem

• Plugin marketplace expansion provides more pre-built plugins for common integrations and workflows.
• Plugin development improvements simplify creating custom plugins with better SDKs and documentation.
• Plugin isolation enhancements ensure plugins don’t interfere with each other or the core platform.
• Plugin versioning enables teams to manage plugin updates and dependencies more effectively.

Kubernetes Integration Improvements

1. Kubernetes plugin enhancements provide better visualization of workloads, services, and ingress resources.
2. Multi-cluster support enables viewing and managing resources across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
3. Resource health indicators provide real-time status of pods, deployments, and services.
4. Cost insights integration shows resource usage and cost allocation per service.

Developer Experience Enhancements

• Search improvements enable faster discovery of services, APIs, and documentation across the platform.
• TechDocs enhancements provide better documentation rendering with improved navigation and search.
• Software templates expansion offers more scaffolding options for common service patterns.
• CI/CD integration improvements provide better visibility into build and deployment pipelines.

Security & Access Control

• RBAC improvements enable fine-grained access control for different user roles and teams.
• Authentication enhancements support more identity providers and SSO configurations.
• Audit logging provides comprehensive tracking of user actions and platform changes.
• Secret management integration enables secure handling of credentials and API keys.

Getting Started

npx @backstage/create-app@latest
cd my-backstage-app
yarn dev

Install Kubernetes plugin:

yarn workspace app add @backstage/plugin-kubernetes

Summary

Backstage 1.0 demonstrates maturity in the developer portal space, providing teams with powerful tools to improve developer productivity and platform visibility.