Backstage Weekly 48 - Upcoming Backstage backend APIs, EKS Clusters in the Catalog

Hi, y’all! This week’s newsletter introduces the state of Backstage’s Backend system evolution regarding plugins, announces a new way of ingesting infrastructure into the Catalog, and shares Roadie’s new security certification.

The upcoming plugins system

Back in May, jhaals opened an RFC to restructure Backstage’s Backend system. It is a known fact that the current plugin system is error-prone due to the multiple touch points it requires and that things can get tricky when you manage or author plugins for plugins. The proposal seeks to simplify installations and establish extension points for plugins through unified APIs.

Recently, we’ve seen the RFC materializing over a series of PRs that have established an alpha version of this proposal. The maintainers expect a gradual migration of plugins to the new APIs, so there’s nothing to fear! You’ll also most likely be able to install legacy plugins in the foreseeable future.

I recommend checking out the RFC; it’s got neat examples to understand the kind of changes that we can expect.

Get your own production Backstage instance with drag-and-drop plugins and secure integrations with Roadie. Request a free trial!

Ingest EKS Clusters into the Catalog

While ingesting infrastructure into the Catalog is generally discouraged, you may find yourself in a situation where your resources are stable enough to have them listed as entities. backjo contributed two pieces from their internal Backstage that make this possible:

• A new processor in the Catalog AWS plugin to ingest EKS clusters
• A new locator in the kubernetes-backend plugin that allow sourcing Kubernetes cluster information from the catalog

Learn more about these in the pull request.

Roadie achieved SOC2 Type 2 Compliance

We have a set of mature and robust security and availability practices at Roadie and wanted to validate them against industry standards. We see this achievement as a milestone in our ever-improving security journey. Read more in our blog post.