Backstage from Spotify

And the number 1️⃣ Backstage milestone of 2024 is…Backend System 1.0! We’re getting ready to blast off into the New Year 🧨 by counting down the Backstage community’s Top 5️⃣ milestones from 2024. Today is our big number 1️⃣: ”Version 1.0 of the Future of Backstage🎉”. After months of testing, feedback, and improvements with the community, the New Backend System landed as a stable v.1.0 release in September — marking the beginning of a new era for building for Backstage. Along with enabling features to more easily leverage powerful core services and dynamic behaviors, the backend system also lays the foundation for us being able to continue iterating at a high pace without incurring undue end user breakages during upgrades. Learn more about the backend system and the future of Backstage — along with the other major features we released this year — on the Backstage blog. Thanks to everyone in the community for an amazing 2024! 🎆 For all the year’s highlights, read “Backstage Wrapped 2024”: https://hubs.li/Q030v-j60 And it’s to the future we go! See you in 2025!🥳🍾🥂

2 Legit 2 Quit: The Official Backstage Certification Launches🎓 We’re getting ready to blast off into the New Year 🧨 by counting down the Backstage community’s Top 5️⃣ milestones from 2024. Today is number 2️⃣: “2 Legit 2 Quit: The Official Backstage Certification Launches🎓”. With the Backstage community growing across so many companies, the need for Backstage experts grows, as well. Now there’s an easy way to spot ‘em. Last month, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and The Linux Foundation Education announced the launch of a new certification: Certified Backstage Associate (CBA). So now you can make your expertise for “building on top of the most popular open source IDP” official. Check out the Backstage blog to learn more about why the CBA is a huge help for Backstage experts and practitioners, as well as all those Backstage adopters (and future adopters) who prioritize developer experience and productivity amid the increasing complexity of modern software development. 🎆 For all the year’s highlights, read “Backstage Wrapped 2024”: https://hubs.li/Q030vxxD0

278 Companies Listed in the ADOPTERS .md file💚 We’re getting ready to blast off into the New Year 🧨 by counting down the Backstage community’s Top 5️⃣ milestones from 2024. Today is number 3️⃣: "278 Companies Listed in the ADOPTERS .md file💚" There are thousands of companies who have adopted Backstage as their IDP of choice — and, of course, we 💚 all our Backstage adopters equally. But the ones who add their names to the ADOPTERS .md file in the Backstage repo might get an extra big hug from us on their birthdays. Just saying. This year 21 companies added themselves to the ADOPTERS .md file, bringing the total to 278. Find out what all the companies on the list have in common — along with links to some of the year’s best adoption stories — on the Backstage blog. 🎆 For all the year’s highlights, read “Backstage Wrapped 2024”: https://hubs.li/Q030v-8K0

210+ Open Source Plugins (and Counting)🧩 We’re getting ready to blast off into the New Year 🧨 by counting down the Backstage community’s Top 5️⃣ milestones from 2024. Today is number 4️⃣: "210+ Open Source Plugins (and Counting)🧩." Plugins, plugins, plugins. Everybody’s building them, everywhere you look. We see official Backstage plugins from popular third-party service providers (DX, PagerDuty, Rootly), in-house plugins going open source (from adopters like DAZN, Keyloop, and SeatGeek), essential plugins built and maintained by ecosystem champions and supporters (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Roadie, Spotify), as well as creative and useful plugins from contributors and enthusiasts from all corners of the Backstage community. This year, around a hundred new open source plugins were introduced, with many others getting big updates. Learn why 2024 was a yearlong plugin party — including links to some of the best new and improved plugins and why the brand new Backstage Community Repository (hat tip to Red Hat) makes it easier than ever to build and ship your own plugins — on the Backstage blog. 🎆 For all the year’s highlights, read “Backstage Wrapped 2024”: https://hubs.li/Q030vxxC0

60k+ Contributions from a Global Community of Very Busy Beavers🦫 We’re getting ready to blast off into the New Year 🧨 by counting down the Backstage community’s Top 5️⃣ milestones from 2024. Kicking things off at number 5️⃣: "60k+ Contributions from a Global Community of Very Busy Beavers🦫". This year our worldwide community of 1.6k Backstage contributors reached 60,000 total contributions to the project since Spotify donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2020. And we were as active as ever in 2024. You can see all 12.3k commits from the year in the visualization below — plus more contribution highlights, including how we compared to other CNCF projects — on the Backstage blog. 🎆 For all the year's highlights, read “Backstage Wrapped 2024”: https://hubs.li/Q030vWb10

Starting in 2️⃣0️⃣ minutes! What has Finland’s largest financial services group learned from their Backstage journey so far? Join us at our Backstage Community Session at 10am ET (16:00 CET) to find out: https://lnkd.in/eTUFr4yv

Who has two pointer fingers and the “InfoWorld 2024 Technology of the Year Award for Software Development: Platforms”? 👉🏆👈 Yep! Congrats to the Backstage project maintainers, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and everyone in the Backstage community — including all our contributors, adopters, partners, and end users. It’s great to see developer experience recognized for the critical role it plays in innovation. As the InfoWorld judges say: “Backstage has significantly transformed the developer experience by centralizing tools and simplifying workflows, leading to improved efficiency and faster onboarding. Its open source nature encourages continuous innovation, allowing it to evolve rapidly with contributions from a thriving community.” See all the winners of the InfoWorld 2024 Technology of the Year Award: https://hubs.li/Q02_Brxx0

ICYMI: The New Stack recently featured a hands-on guide to adding Stratos — an open source multicluster UI that supports Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, and GKE — to Backstage.🙌 Want to simplify infrastructure management with a streamlined, centralized view of multicluster environments? It’s as easy as building a Backstage plugin — let Sylvain Kalache show you how it’s done in this step-by-step demonstration 🛠️: https://hubs.li/Q02_fpPf0

Backstage improves developer experience and productivity for companies of all shapes and sizes, from big enterprises to fast-growing startups. For startup Quantum Metric, Backstage helps the company keep up with their “rapidly growing product and customer base” and makes it possible for their engineering org to maintain “efficiency and scalability while staying lean” — and they have the metrics to back it up.🚀 Read all about it in a blog post by senior director of engineering Eric Irwin, who writes about why Quantum Metric selected Backstage as their IDP, the custom plugins they’ve built for it, and how they measure its impact on their org — including how the value of Backstage to Quantum’s engineering teams is amplified by the “flywheel effect” of having a centralized internal development platform. 📖 You can read Eric’s post — “IDPs For The Rest of Us: Maximizing Impact When You Aren’t a Tech Giant” — on Medium: https://lnkd.in/ekkXd-7J 📺 Or watch his BackstageCon talk here: https://hubs.li/Q02_b4Xy0

If you want to get a feeling for how the Backstage community is doing, there’s no better way than to see it in person. Last month was BackstageCon and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024. Spotify’s Backstage team headed out to 🏔️Salt Lake City to give and attend talks, work the booths and kiosks, pet cute pups at the “Pet A Pup” station — and chat with adopters, partners, contributors, end users, and total strangers about everyone’s favorite platform for improving developer experience. If you couldn’t make it out there, we rounded up our thoughts, feelings, and favorite moments from the week on the Backstage blog. Check it out to get up to speed on all the sessions, hear the big themes emerging from the community, and see more great pics from the world of Backstage, courtesy of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)'s Flickr. Plus, bonus photos of floofy pups, as a treat!🐕 You can catch up on the Backstage blog here 👉 https://hubs.li/Q02-YBDt0 Miss out on all the community-building fun last month? Join us in 💂London in April for BackstageCon and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025!