How Brex Leverages Backstage for Fintech Engineering Growth
Talkat Open Source in Finance Forum New York 2022 · on Thursday, 2022-12-08· at 16:55· HALL 1, New York, NY, USA·
summary
Brex scales developer onboarding and runtime ops after a 5x engineering growth (from under 100 to ~500 engineers) by adopting Backstage in 2021 and getting a POC live within weeks. Adoption focuses on a software catalog seeded automatically from repos and Kubernetes runtimes (starting with gRPC services), custom entity providers (employees, AWS resources), and a scaffolder that creates code, Docker repos and kicks off async DB/infra workflows. A gRPC‑gateway reverse proxy enables React plugins; high usage concentrates on action plugins (deploy/rollback, event timeline, Kafka DLQ), not passive docs, and everything is tracked by WAU and plugin metrics.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Brex and Backstage journey
- 1:04Why Brex needed portal
- 3:10Choosing Backstage
- 4:33Adopting core plugins
- 6:59Populating software catalog
- 8:05Automating catalog ingestion
- 10:56Building with scaffolder
- 13:43Custom plugins for Brex
- 16:54Key plugins in use
- 17:36Driving adoption through education
- 19:02Measuring Backstage impact
- 21:08Maintaining Backstage at scale
- 22:31Tracking usage and features
- 23:35Key lessons from adoption
- 24:38Q&A on plugin design
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