This message was deleted.

Hi Joanne, one of the core features of Backstage is as a service catalogue so if you already have it, it seems like a good choice. I’m looking at Backstage for exactly this so that we can manage our catalogue using Git flow. It also breaks down the barriers between different groups who don’t have licences for (or access to) Confluence, GitHub etc.

I am currently working on a project that is using Backstage as the catalog and primary interface for platform capabilities. We went this route for the same reasons Alan mentioned above. We also like it because everything is derived from code so it's easy for folks to contribute to and is in a repo.

Thanks so much @Alan Kelly & @Oliver Eikenberry. What are you using to as user interface to surface that data from Backstage? Is the frontend user friendly to non-engineers?

It depends what data you’d like to surface - there are various plugins for scorecards that non-engineers could understand but not sure exactly what you’re looking for

@Sam Farid, some attributes we’ve thought of include description, tags, Github repo, Readme, scopes & permissions, sandbox/environment, known issues, lifecycle status, currently supported version(s), expiry date, near end of life versions, contact, ability to subscribe for updates. This isn’t a comprehensive list but we aim to pull the data automatically and minimise ongoing maintenance effort.

I see - I think I misunderstood the question initially. I thought you were asking “how can we get all this data into backstage” but it actually seems you’re asking “how can we export data that’s already in backstage to a more user-friendly frontend.” If that’s the case, I do not personally know of any tools out there that will export data into different formats, so I agree with the people above that backstage’s catalogue would serve as a very reasonable frontend for non-technical users as well. Perhaps one thing to consider is Harness recently launched a managed backstage service. I don’t work for them and haven’t used it personally so I can’t directly vouch for it - I just met the team at kubecon last year. But might be useful because they have a bunch of managed plugins and support custom dashboards, as well as a support team to help you set it all up. So that may be everything you’re looking for

Roadie is also a managed Backstage company https://roadie.io

Thank you @Sam Farid, yes that’s right. I meant for Backstage data to be automatically surfaced in a user-friendly user interface. Great, I’ll check out Harness too.