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Platform portals with Backstage

Platform portals are one of the most common user interfaces to offer to consumers of your platform. Graphical interfaces allow your users to view, inspect, and create new resources in a browser and can be useful in your platform.

Backstage is a popular framework for implementing your own platform portal. Backstage is a web app and must get deployed and run somewhere. This solution demonstrates deploying a sample Backstage instance to an EKS cluster, preconfigured for connectivity to an Upbound control plane.

Backstage is just one way you can create a portal for your platform. Others include building your own portal from scratch, using Upbound's built-in Consumer Portal, or other vendor-based portals.

Deploying Backstage​

This solution uses a prebuilt Configuration, xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/configuration-backstage, to define a composite resource called XBackstage for deploying an instance of Backstage onto an EKS cluster. It includes optional integrations for managed services such as:

  • AWS networking components
  • AWS Load Balancer Controller
  • External DNS Controller
  • NGINX Ingress Controller
  • Cert Manager
  • EKS Pod Identity for service-level access control

In the solution, this configuration is what gets applied to the frontend XEnvironment control plane. This control plane purpose is to provision the backing infrastructure outlined above along with a deployment of Backstage.

Preconfigured Backstage​

The Backstage instance comes from a private Upbound source repository containing a typical Backstage application scaffold, optimized for integration with an Upbound control plane. This tuning includes:

  • Upbound authentication to communicate with the corresponding control plane
  • A plugin to automatically ingest control plane APIs and generate Backstage resource templates
  • A plugin to automatically ingest Crossplane resources on the control plane and register them the Backstage entity catalog
  • Theming to match the Upbound product experience

Backstage connects directly to your Upbound control plane. When you deploy new Configuration packages, Backstage updates its resource templates automatically with no coding required.

Customize Backstage​

Commercial Upbound customers can request access to the source code for this Backstage app for further customization.