Spotify launched its Spotify Plugins for Backstage subscription as an open beta to all Backstage adopters. It contains a bundle of five plugins: Soundcheck, Role-Based Access Control, Skill Exchange, Pulse, and Insights.
“The Spotify Plugins for Backstage bundle is the next step toward Spotify’s goal to share what we’ve learned with the world. We’re confident these plugins will take each and every developer portal built on Backstage to the next level, by making developers in your organization happier and more productive,” Austin Lamon, Director, GM of Backstage at Spotify wrote in a blog post.
The first plugin, Soundcheck, codifies engineering best practices to improve quality, reliability, security, and alignment throughout a software ecosystem in a gamified way. It includes an entity page that provides a comprehensive snapshot of a specific entity’s tech health, pass or fail checks, and an overview page that provides a grid view of all entities owned by specific groups inside the organization.
The next plugin, Role-Based Access Control helps users manage access and protect their data in Backstage to meet evolving security and compliance needs.
Skill Exchange is an internal marketplace to promote and seek out unique, on-the-job learning opportunities for developers and other members of the tech ecosystem. It offers search and quick navigation to learning opportunities.
Pulse lets users track productivity and satisfaction metrics so that they can visualize metrics in Backstage.
Lastly, Insights enables developers to see how the organization is performing in Backstage by underscoring on the roadmap where things need to be doubled down on or deprecated.
“These plugins have been put through endless hours of internal use, iteration, and improvement. We know they work because they’ve done amazing things for us — from Soundcheck bringing test flakiness to below 1% to Skill Exchange powering thousands of collaborative hacks between teams,” Lamon added.
