Chicago skyline
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023, held in Chicago, was a huge success, with more than 10,000 attendees from around the world. The event was packed with exciting keynotes, technical sessions and networking opportunities.
Behind the scenes, an open source project from Spotify, is steadily gaining traction in the cloud native ecosystem. The Backstage Developer Portal is an open source platform designed to improve the developer experience and productivity in software development organizations. In 2020, Spotify used the open source project to allow businesses to customize it to their needs.
The rise of platform engineering and internal developer portals led to the adoption of this project. At KubeCon 2023, there were many announcements regarding Backstage.
There was a special pre-conference, BackstageCon, which focused on best practices for Backstage implementation. It had speakers from Spotify, VMware, Red Hat, Comcast and Thoughtworks sharing their experience of developing and using the developer portal.
Backstage dominated Red Hat’s announcements at KubeCon 2023.
Here are the key points:
Consolidation and optimization 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 by addressing the challenges developers face when navigating complex resources within an organization.
Role-based access control plugin: Red Hat has announced the open source of a role-based access control plugin for Backstage. This addition is an important step in making Backstage more accessible and business-friendly. Simplifies access control and enhances security within the platform.
Introducing Dynamic Plugins: Another notable contribution of Red Hat is the introduction of Dynamic Plugins. This feature allows new plugins to be easily added to Backstage without the need for complex code changes, thus facilitating the integration of new tools and making Backstage adoption by large enterprises more efficient.
Donation of new plugins from Red Hat: Red Hat has expanded its contribution to the Backstage project by donating five new plugins. This contribution adds to the existing list of plugins already sponsored by Red Hat, providing greater customization options while maintaining a unified developer experience
These add-ons include:
Azure Container Registry Plug-in: Simplifies container image management and supports efficient deployment in Azure.
JFrog Artifactory Plug-in: Improves automated continuous integration and delivery processes.
Kiali Plug-in: Provides an observability console for Istio, simplifying the management of microservices architectures.
Nexus Plug-ins: Manages binaries and artifacts used in the development process.
Add 3 scale: Helps create, develop, manage and scale APIs.
These announcements from KubeCon 2023 underscore the growing importance of the Backstage Developer Portal to the local cloud community, particularly in improving 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 users, with more than half of them having adopted 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.
