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Operating Backstage

Placeholder

This document is a structural draft (placeholder). Each section only lists the items to be covered. Content will be added later.

What this document covers​

Cover the deployment, maintenance, monitoring, and upgrade considerations required to run Backstage stably in production.

1. Deployment topology​

  • Building the container image (official Dockerfile)
  • Deploying to Kubernetes (Helm, etc.)
  • Operating PostgreSQL (using a managed DB)
  • Per-environment app-config management (app-config.production.yaml)

2. Operating auth and permissions​

  • Production auth provider configuration
  • Operating Permission Framework policies
  • Secret management (Key Vault, etc.)

3. Upgrade strategy​

  • Understanding the Backstage release cycle
  • Upgrading versions with backstage-cli
  • Verifying plugin compatibility
  • Handling breaking changes (e.g., new backend system migration)

4. Monitoring and observability​

  • Health checks / metrics
  • Log collection
  • Monitoring catalog ingestion errors
  • Related: Observability Basics

5. Backup and DR​

  • PostgreSQL backups
  • Backing up TechDocs storage
  • Recovery procedures

6. Performance and scaling​

  • Scaling strategy for frontend/backend
  • Managing catalog ingestion load
  • Caching strategy

7. Cost management​

Best Practices​

  • Manage configuration as Infrastructure as Code
  • Upgrade regularly (avoid version drift)
  • Validate in a staging environment
  • Anti-patterns (frozen versions, manual configuration)

References​