Kubernetes

Welcome to the Backstage Kubernetes frontend plugin!

This plugin exposes information about your entity-specific Kubernetes objects with a desire to provide value to the service owner, rather than just a Kubernetes cluster administrator.

It will elevate the visibility of errors where identified, and provide drill down about the deployments, pods, and other objects for a service.

It directly interfaces with the Kubernetes Backend Plugin (@backstage-plugin-kubernetes-backend).

This plugin was created through the Backstage CLI

Introduction

See our announcement blog post New Backstage feature: Kubernetes for Service Owners to learn more about the motivation behind developing the plugin.

Setup & Configuration

This plugin must be explicitly added to a Backstage app, along with it's peer backend plugin.

It requires configuration in the Backstage app-config.yaml to connect to a Kubernetes API control plane.

In addition, configuration of an entity's catalog-info.yaml helps identify which specific Kubernetes object(s) should be presented on a specific entity catalog page.

For more information, see the formal documentation about the Kubernetes feature in Backstage.

Getting started

Your plugin has been added to the example app in this repository, meaning you'll be able to access it by running yarn start in the root directory, and then navigating to /kubernetes.

You can also serve the plugin in isolation by running yarn start in the plugin directory. This method of serving the plugin provides quicker iteration speed and a faster startup and hot reloads. It is only meant for local development, and the setup for it can be found inside the /dev directory.

Integrating with EntityPage (New Frontend System)

Follow this section if you are using Backstage's new frontend system.

1. Import kubernetesPlugin in your App.tsx and add it to your app's features array:

import kubernetesPlugin from '@backstage/plugin-kubernetes/alpha';

// ...

export const app = createApp({
  features: [
    // ...
    kubernetesPlugin,
    // ...
  ],
});

2. Next, enable your desired extensions in app-config.yaml

app:
  extensions:
    - entity-content:kubernetes/kubernetes

Now, the extension appears on your entity page as one of the tabs, which is called KUBERNETES