Backstage Weekly 65 - Custom field explorer, standardized AWS access, 10x growth

Custom Scaffolder Field Explorer

Before Backstage 1.9, you’d have to browse through the OSS codebase and your instance’s repository/docs to know which scaffolder fields were available to your template. Thanks to kuangp, you can now discover and play around with the custom Scaffolder fields installed in your instance, starting from a dropdown UI. This new explorer will show you each custom input’s options, generate a template spec, and show you an example outcome that you can interact with.

To get this new feature, upgrade your Scaffolder to the latest version.

Using managed Backstage lets you focus on building value for your team instead of learning internals and upgrading your instance. Get a Roadie Backstage demo

Standardized AWS auth

AWS is used by a good part of the Backstage community and is thus integrated into a handful of plugins like AWS Cloud Formation, AWS Lambdas, and AWS Proton. However, each plugin had its own way of managing authentication. Thanks to clareliguori, there’s now a unified way to manage the credentials used to call AWS APIs in Backstage: integration-aws-node.

TechDocs S3 publisher has already leveraged the new AWS integration, and more plugins are updating to use it too. To leverage the credentials manager in your Backstage implementation, head over the plugin’s README

Closing the year with an 800% increase in adopters

Backstage celebrated 75 public adopters at the end of 2021, while now the adopters’ list goes over 600. Contributions from the community doubled, from 9k last year to 15k.

The project underwent a process of maturity, gaining Backstage endorsement from industry leaders and community trust. Learn more about Backstage’s year wrapped.

Before saying goodbye, I want to welcome all the adopters that joined the community in December: Garanti BBVA, MoonShiner, and Affinidi!

Talk to you next week!

Jorge L