Backstage 1.22: Developer Portal Excellence and Enhanced DX

Introduction

Developer portals don’t fix broken platforms—but they do fix a common failure mode: knowledge scattered across repos, wikis, and “ask in Slack.” When teams can’t quickly answer “who owns this service?” or “how do I ship it?”, productivity and reliability both suffer.

Backstage 1.22, released on October 15, 2025, improves the core pieces that make an internal developer platform feel cohesive: a stronger service catalog, better documentation workflows, a healthier plugin ecosystem, and performance work that keeps the portal usable as it grows.

Why this matters in practice

• Service ownership clarity: catalog and dependency improvements reduce paging-by-guesswork.
• Golden paths at scale: better templates/scaffolding help platform teams standardize delivery without manual gatekeeping.
• Portal speed matters: performance improvements keep Backstage from becoming “another slow internal tool.”

Portal Capabilities

• Service catalog improvements provide better service discovery and management with enhanced metadata, ownership tracking, and dependency visualization.
• Documentation enhancements enable better documentation management with improved TechDocs integration and search capabilities.
• Software templates improvements enable better software template management with more flexible templates and better scaffolding.
• TechDocs enhancements provide better technical documentation capabilities with improved rendering and navigation.

Plugin Ecosystem

1. Plugin development improvements enable easier plugin development with better tooling, APIs, and development workflows.
2. Plugin marketplace enhancements provide better plugin discovery, installation, and management with versioning and updates.
3. Plugin integration improvements enable better plugin integration with improved APIs and extension points.
4. Custom plugins enable creation of custom plugins for specific organizational needs with comprehensive documentation and examples.

Performance Optimizations

• Page load time reductions minimize time to load portal pages through improved code splitting and lazy loading.
• Search performance improvements enable faster search results with better indexing and query optimization.
• Resource usage optimizations reduce CPU and memory consumption through better caching and resource management.
• Caching improvements provide better response times for frequently accessed data with intelligent caching strategies.

Integration Options

• Kubernetes integration improvements provide seamless integration with Kubernetes including service discovery, resource visualization, and cluster management.
• CI/CD integration enables integration with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and other CI/CD systems for pipeline visualization.
• Git integration enables integration with Git repositories for code browsing, pull requests, and repository management.
• Cloud provider integration provides better integration with AWS, Azure, and GCP services for comprehensive resource management.

Getting Started

# Install Backstage using npx
npx @backstage/create-app

# Or use Backstage Helm chart
helm repo add backstage https://backstage.github.io/charts
helm install backstage backstage/backstage

Summary

Backstage 1.22 continues to be the leading developer portal platform, providing teams with powerful tools for improving developer experience and managing internal developer platforms.