Performance, pagination, new Tech Insights visualisations, GHES support and Wiz certification

The latest features and updates from Roadie.

💈 Performance, Stability & Pagination

We’ve been working on a bunch of different improvements to both performance and stability.

First among them is pagination of the Catalog, without losing filtering.

We’ll be tweaking the filtering UI in the next few weeks and months but the first pass of pagination has proven we can dramatically reduce page load times without impacting the current UI or UX. We’re already seeing ~300ms decreases in load time and increased stability for giant Catalogs (i.e. 100s of thousands of entities).

We’re separately using service workers to pre-load some elements of the application to further speed up page load. More on that to come.

Last but not least, we’ve also been chunking up Backstage into separate pods to help us scale the application as usage grows. More on that to come in blog posts, but if you’re running a giant instance or have reached scale with Tech Insights, splitting individual parts of the application out into separate pods is generally a good idea.

Fun stuff!

Tech Insights Facts: Aggregated

Sometimes you want to just see a Fact in Tech Insights. You don’t want to look at whether it passed or failed a check or whether it is meeting a Scorecard requirement: sometimes you just want the data.

An entity-by-entity view is one thing (which we implemented with Fact Tables) but often you’ll want to see a team-by-team view of fact data.

For checks and scorecards we have roll-ups, and now for Facts we have Fact Cards.

Say you’re tracking DORA metrics or want to see mean time to resolution for incidents. Now you can :)

GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) support

We now support both GHES using the Roadie Agent and GHES combined with github.com (if that floats your boat).

Previous iterations of our GHES support have relied on a connection to the GHES instance over the public internet. This is ok for some organizations but not all, and usually if you’re using GHES you’re pretty pro-security and pro-don’t-send-things-over-the-public-internet.

In the past for these use-cases we used the Roadie Agent, which is based on the open-source Snyk Broker, to create a long-lived websockets connection that is fully controlled by the customer. That hasn’t, up until this point, worked with GHES though.

Now it does! :)

For good measure we threw in the ability to configure both GHES and github.com simulatenously to allow folks who are migrating from one to the other to support both SCMs on their Roadie instnace.

Enjoy!

🧘‍♂️ Scaffolder Actions table

We have also just launched some good ol’ fashioned documentation.

The Scaffolder is an extremely powerful tool, but it doesn’t have the same level of documentation or cataloging that plugins receive. It can be tricky to find out which open-source actions exist and how to use them.

To solve that, we created the Scaffolder Actions Directory. We searched the internet high and low to find all the actions we could. Most of them we support, some are hot of the press and not yet included in Roadie. We’ll keep updating it as the Actions ecosystem evolves.

Check it out: https://roadie.io/docs/scaffolder/scaffolder-actions-directory/

🔌 Plugins & Integrations roundup

• Wiz plugin: Our Wiz plugin is now certified! The new Wiz security frontend plugin surfaces Wiz data inside Backstage. We’ve worked with Wiz to give it ol’ seal of approval. It’s available both inside Roadie and as an OSS plugin. 👩‍🚀🚀