Backstage Community Session — Aug 20, 2025

Get a rundown on the improvements in Backstage v1.42.0, including the release of the New Frontend System — which is now ready for adoption. 00:00 Our host Mihai welcomes the community back after a little summer break in July. 01:13 What’s new in Backstage v1.41 and 1.42: Backstage core maintainer Freben takes us through the highlights from the two latest releases, including new defaults in Catalog Backend 3.0, renaming the new Canon design system to Backstage UI, the ready–for–prime time New Frontend System, the switch to Rspack as the default bundler in the CLI, the Kubernetes plugin on the new backend system, and more. 09:57 Backstage core maintainer Ben Lambert does a live demo of the New Frontend System highlighting how easy it is to install plugins. (The most difficult part of the demo was having to log out and back into the meeting because of Zoom fussiness.) Try out the New Frontend System for yourself today and share your experience with us! 14:28 BackstageCon and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2025 North America is coming up, November 10–13. Hope to see you in Atlanta! 16:11 Q&A with the maintainers, including the rollout of the New Frontend System, how isolating plugins improves plugin management inside your Backstage instance, documentation for migrating to the new system, and more. Join the Backstage community! Backstage is an open framework for building internal developer portals (IDPs). It was created by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2020. The Backstage Community Session is the monthly meetup where we all come together to listen to the latest maintainer updates, learn from each other about adopting, share exciting new demos or discuss any relevant topic like developer effectiveness, developer experience, developer portals, and more. 🗓 Join us for our monthly Community Sessions: https://github.com/backstage/communit... ✉️ Subscribe to the newsletter for product updates, community news, and more: https://spoti.fi/backstagenewsletter 🧑🏼‍💻 For features, demos, and docs: https://backstage.io 🗣️ Have questions? Reach out on Discord:   / discord