Internal Developer Platform v2: Custom Backstage plugins

What’s New in v2

Last week we shipped a major update to the Internal Developer Platform with three new Backstage plugins:

1. Automated Environment Provisioning

Engineers can now spin up full-stack ephemeral environments from a PR. Each environment gets its own namespace in the dev Kubernetes cluster, a dedicated database schema, and seeded test data. Environments auto-teardown after 24 hours of inactivity.

Built with a custom Backstage scaffolder action that calls our Terraform modules and ArgoCD.

2. Cost Dashboards

Every service now shows its real-time AWS cost breakdown directly in Backstage. We pull data from the AWS Cost Explorer API and cache it in Redis. Teams can see cost-per-request and cost-per-environment metrics.

3. Service Dependency Graph

A force-directed graph showing runtime dependencies between services, with alert status overlaid on each node. Built using D3.js and our service registry data. Makes it trivial to understand blast radius during incidents.

Feedback So Far

“The env provisioning is a game changer. No more stepping on each other’s toes in staging.” — Frontend team lead

“I found $2K/month in unused resources just by checking the cost dashboard once.” — Engineering manager