👋 Request from Backstage Community: What are the top 3 obstacles to Backstage adoption in your organization? 🧵

To me, the current top obstacle is needing to code for many important features, like the Tech Radar plugin — which defaults to hard-coded entries! it should at least support CSV — or the Cost Insights plugin. In the past, it was the difficulty upgrading to a new Backstage version (it seems to be getting easier)

@Taras Mankovski I have a lots of thoughts and context on this. I would be more than happy to share my thoughts. What is the best way for you to constructively learn? I would happily chat on Zoom (other video chats are available etc etc), or if you prefer here I can put aside time to write down my thoughts here.

Thank you @Daniel Serodio for your feedback.

For me the top obstacle is the need to reconcile the Backstage catalog model with an existing organizational product or service model. This means that you need some sort of org-wide effort rather than a grassroots, bottom up approach.

@jpeach would it be possible for you to describe how the default model doesn’t map onto your organization data model? btw, we’ve seen other adopters share this obstacle, so i want to make sure we understand what needs to be more flexible

Yeh it’s not that complicated. There is already a system that tracks (some) projects and it has some set of metadata. Backstage catalog entities overlap with some metadata but also have some unique entries. So do you ditch the old system and move entirely to catalog yaml files? Do you try to retain both systems somehow? Do you add extra metadata into the original system? These are questions that affect the whole org, and organizational change is hard, so someone needs to drive it and push to get consensus where there are no obvious decision makers. Not a tech issue at all.