Who has experience with backstage here? Does anyone think of having a backstage plugin as a good vector to getting people to try out your saas?

I think I saw them at QCon SF last month. As a vector, the only question is "do they have adoption" and "do you see adoption in a key segment" FWIW, after talking to them, my impression was that it is still challenging to use. So I think it will take a bit of time until you see serious adoption.

That thought crossed my mind, hence I've done some research to understand their traction @Felix GV I couldn't understand how well it's adopted, especially because none from my circles were using it. Hence, i postponed my idea of building a plugin for backstage for now.

I had never heard of it until last Friday. Now that I do know about it, I’ve started asking around and heard of a few companies that did use it, either as some kind of pilot or "for real". It’s one of those things that creep up on you and by the time you notice it it’s already everywhere (maybe) 😂

I'm with you. Even I was super surprised when none from my (small but in different companies) circle were using it. Automatically cataloging services and APIs is going to be a norm in a couple of years. we're doing a lot of it in our product Levo.ai too. I'm happy to brainstorm if you have any ideas/questions.

I noticed that they are in the CNCF, which probably gives them more visibility and credibility. @Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy is Levo joining too?

Good question and idea. We haven't open sourced our project yet but I guess that's an option. Will think more..

There are backstage plugins to interact with proprietary services too, though (but maybe that wasn’t your point)

I do use Backstage at Sysdig? We have done a lot of interesting work in this area ? Fire up any questions you have.

@Ronak Kogta thank you. What plugins do you use the most?

We do have some custom plugins built for our use case. Other oss plugins we use 1. Pagerduty and along with integration with runbook automation system, and fire hydrant plugin 2. Scaffolder (Very convenient to write skeleton codebase, for eg. helm skeleton, java microservice skeleton ) which raises them as pull request 3. Catalog plugin to track all components(microservice) that we have.

How does your Catalog plugin work? Did you automate the addition of microservice into Backstage or is there any manual process?

Adding any service has been a manual process. As we had handful of services amounting to be 60 or something, just metadata setup has to be done once. Then you can keep building it again and again. We now also do partial automation with scaffolder plugin, as it allows these metadata files to be present right out of box.

Would you find it useful to automatically populate the services and API endpoints (with OpenApi specs)? That's the plugin I had in mind that we can build for Backstage using Levo's product.

I am tracking their office hours and progress even before backstage reached 1.0. I tried to install couple of months back but didnt succeeded, if I recall correctly. Idea of templated services is not new though.

How do you track that? Do they have a slack/other? Or from their blog, etc?

I usually watch/get notified for their community sessions and also peek into their slack.