KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023, held in Chicago, was a tremendous success, with over 10,000 attendees from all over the world. The event was jam-packed with exciting keynotes, technical sessions and networking opportunities.
Backstage, an open source project from Spotify, has been steadily gaining traction in the cloud native ecosystem. The Backstage Developer Portal is an open-source platform designed to improve developer experience and productivity in software development organizations. In 2020, Spotify open-sourced the project to enable businesses to adapt it to their needs.
The rise of platform engineering and internal developer portals has led to the adoption of this project. At KubeCon 2023, there were multiple announcements related to Backstage.
There was a dedicated pre-conference, BackstageCon, which focused on the best practices for implementing Backstage. It had speakers from Spotify, VMware, Red Hat, Comcast and Thoughtworks sharing their experience of deploying and using the developer portal.
Backstage dominated the announcements from Red Hat made at KubeCon 2023.
Here are the key points:
Integration and Streamlining of Developer Tools: Backstage was highlighted as a portal that seamlessly integrates a vast array of developer tools, documentation, and templates. This integration aims to streamline developer workflows, addressing the challenges faced by developers in navigating complex resources within an organization.
Role-Based Access Control Plugin: Red Hat announced the open-sourcing of a role-based access control plugin for Backstage. This plugin is a significant step in making Backstage more accessible and enterprise-friendly. It simplifies access control and enhances security within the platform.
Dynamic Plugins Introduction: Another noteworthy contribution from Red Hat is the introduction of Dynamic Plugins. This feature allows for the easy addition of new plugins to Backstage without the need for complex code changes, thereby facilitating the integration of new tools and making it more efficient for large enterprises to adopt Backstage.
Donation of New Plug-ins by Red Hat: Red Hat expanded its contribution to the Backstage project by donating five new plugins. This contribution adds to the existing list of plugins already donated by Red Hat, providing greater customization options while maintaining a unified developer experience.
These plug-ins include:
Azure Container Registry Plug-in: Simplifies container image management and supports efficient deployment on Azure.
JFrog Artifactory Plug-in: Enhances automated continuous integration and delivery processes.
Kiali Plug-in: Provides an observability console for Istio, simplifying the management of microservices architectures.
Nexus Plug-in: Manages binary components and artifacts used in the development process.
3scale Plug-in: Assists in creating, deploying, managing, and scaling APIs.
These announcements from KubeCon 2023 underscore the growing importance of the Backstage Developer Portal in the cloud-native community, particularly in enhancing developer productivity and efficiency through improved integration and management of development tools and resources.
Backstage has grown tremendously since becoming a CNCF incubator in 2022. It now has 2,250 adopters, with more than half of them adopting it in 2023 alone, and over 4,000 companies evaluating it. Spotify developers have also created Backstage plugins for the OS community, specifically CNCF projects such as Kubernetes, Argo, Prometheus and Kubevela.
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