Backstage Weekly 81 - Safe access to Badges, K8s pod logs
By Jorge Lainfiesta • May 9th, 2023Hi y’all! I’ve got great news in this week’s newsletter:
- Backstage Badges coming to authenticated backends
- Kubernetes plugins: pod logs and upgrade
- Roadie is hiring a Senior Product Manager
- Announcing the new Unpacked Conference
Backstage Badges: now compatible with authenticated backends
Badges are a great way to promote Backstage within your organization, as they give visibility to your IDP and provide relevant information to the repo. However, the Badges plugin couldn’t be used if your Catalog API was protected behind authentication, which is the case for many adopters.
To address this issue, Rbillon59 implemented an obfuscation mechanism that lets badges be publicly accessible without exposing the Catalog API.
Kudos to Romain for the excellent PR description! This new feature will be released as part of Backstage 1.14, scheduled for May 16th, so stay tuned.
🧡 Roadie is hiring 🧡 If you’re a Product Manager with experience in dev tooling and want to work with Backstage, Roadie is looking for you! Apply now!
Kubernetes plugin: New pod logs and migration to aws-sdk v3
The Kubernetes plugin keeps getting better! This time I want to highlight two improvements: a new UI for viewing new pod logs and the migration to v3 of the aws-sdk. These features bring a few breaking changes, so beware when upgrading next time.
Let’s start with the Pod Logs! mclarke47 championed the open-sourcing of Spotify’s internal code for viewing pod logs in the Kubernetes plugin.
These new UI components will help surface information about your pods more easily. Beware that two React components were renamed, so if you were using them for custom extensions to the plugin, you’d have to update them when upgrading. Check out the PR for additional details.
On the other hand, Roadie’s punkle migrated the aws-sdk from v2 to v3. The new SDK comes with modernized interfaces for client configurations and utilities. Three methods were removed from the AwsIamKubernetesAuthTranslator. For more details, check out the PR.
Both of these improvements to the Kubernetes plugins will be released as part of Backstage 1.14, scheduled for May 16th.
Announcing the Unpacked Conference
Roadie is proud to support Cloudsmith’s new virtual Conference for DevOps professionals: Unpacked! The conference will revolve around securing and scaling software delivery. Be sure to RSVP!
