Cloud environments weren’t built to be simple. They were built to be powerful. And that power comes from the endless flexibility and scale the cloud offers. One of the cloud’s greatest superpowers is the ecosystem it enables — but for many platform teams, that same ecosystem creates friction and fragmentation.
So along with that power comes a familiar challenge: complexity. Firefly was created to tame that sprawl, and help teams make sense of thousands of moving parts, across services, accounts, providers, and IaC tools.
That’s where Backstage comes in. As a developer portal and Internal Developer Platform (IDP), Backstage aims to simplify and centralize the developer experience, offering a curated, consistent interface for managing services and infrastructure. It gives teams a system of record, a source of truth — but not always the most complete picture of what’s happening in the cloud.
Now, with Firefly’s new Backstage plugin, we’re bridging that gap.
This native integration brings cloud visibility, drift detection, IaC coverage insights, and system-to-resource relationship mapping directly into your Backstage instance. Platform teams can see exactly which resources exist, how they relate to components in the catalog, and which are managed versus drifting: all in one place.
It’s a full-stack plugin designed to enhance Backstage with the operational intelligence Firefly provides, so developers can move faster, safer, and with much more clarity.
Why Bring Firefly to Backstage?
We’ve always believed in meeting platform engineers and developers where they already work. And for many teams, that central hub is Backstage. It’s where service ownership lives, where templates are launched, and where documentation meets deployment.
But even as Backstage helps streamline the developer experience, there’s often a blind spot: cloud infrastructure. What’s running where? What’s unmanaged? What’s drifting from its IaC definition?
That’s exactly the visibility Firefly brings — and with our new Backstage plugin, we’re embedding it directly into the developer portal. No context switching. No separate dashboards. Just unified insight into the cloud environment, right alongside your catalog of services and components.
This integration enables teams to:
- Import cloud assets and accounts into the software catalog as first-class entities.
- Visualize relationships between cloud resources, services, and systems.
- Track Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) coverage for every component.
- Highlight unmanaged or drifted resources that fall outside your IaC definitions.
- Receive automated updates to stay in sync with your ever-changing infrastructure.
You get a living, breathing view of your cloud footprint—directly inside the portal your developers already use every day.
A Closer Look: How the Plugin Works
The Firefly Backstage Plugin is a full-stack integration, built with both backend and frontend components to provide a complete experience inside the Backstage ecosystem.
In Backstage, plugins are modular building blocks that extend functionality across the developer portal. While frontend plugins handle the user interface—dashboards, widgets, and visualizations—backend plugins are responsible for the heavy lifting: fetching data from external systems, transforming it, and enriching the catalog with new entities and relationships.
For a cloud visibility tool like Firefly, both sides are essential to the developer and platform experience. The backend plugin connects to Firefly’s APIs, imports your cloud resources and accounts as entities, and correlates them with existing components in the catalog. It handles periodic syncs, applies filters, and maps relationships between systems and services.
Meanwhile, the frontend plugin surfaces that data in context—on a dedicated Firefly dashboard and within individual service pages. It visualizes Infrastructure-as-Code coverage, highlights unmanaged or drifted resources, and helps developers see their operational footprint without ever leaving the portal.
Together, these two pieces form a tightly integrated bridge between Firefly’s cloud intelligence and the developer experience Backstage was built to deliver.
Backend Plugin
The backend plugin connects your Backstage instance to Firefly’s API and performs several key functions:
Resource & System Import
Imports individual cloud resources (like S3 buckets or Lambda functions) as resource entities and cloud accounts (like AWS accounts or GCP projects) as system entities.
Smart Correlation
Relates these imported assets to your existing Backstage components using:
- Tag-based mapping via configurable tag keys
- Name-based mapping by matching tag values to component names
Dependency Mapping
Establishes relationships between resources, systems, and components—enabling rich dependency graphs within the catalog.
Flexible Filtering
Specify exactly which assets to import using filters by account ID, asset type, and more.
Scheduled Updates
Automatically re-syncs with Firefly at a configurable interval, ensuring your catalog stays fresh.
Frontend Plugin
The frontend plugin enhances the Backstage UI with Firefly-powered insights:
Dedicated Firefly Page
A /firefly route with a dashboard showing:
- Total cloud resources and systems
- IaC coverage across your infrastructure
- Top components with unmanaged or drifted resources
Entity Page Widgets
Adds IaC coverage cards directly to service component pages, helping developers instantly understand whether a resource is managed properly—or slipping into shadow infrastructure.
Together, the backend and frontend plugins transform Backstage from a static portal into a live cloud intelligence console.
Use Cases: Where Firefly Really Shines
This plugin isn’t just about visual polish — it’s about solving real-world pain points that platform teams face every day.
1. Shadow Infrastructure Detection
Backstage helps you track the services and components your teams create and register—but what’s out of scope is what is actually running in the cloud. Firefly bridges that gap by continuously scanning your cloud environment to discover unmanaged or drifted resources. This makes it easy to detect shadow infrastructure, close ownership gaps, and bring everything under control—without needing to leave the portal.
2. IaC Coverage Auditing
While Backstage shows templated services and their ownership, it doesn’t indicate whether underlying infrastructure is managed via code. Firefly overlays IaC coverage on top of your catalog, making it easy to spot which components are fully codified—and which ones are at risk due to manual provisioning or drift.
3. Cloud-Centric Dependency Graphs
Backstage supports software component relationships through metadata and plugin-based modeling. Firefly extends this with live dependency mapping across cloud systems and services, automatically showing how infrastructure resources connect to one another and to catalog components.
4. Multi-Account Visibility
Backstage plugins often focus on internal metadata or service-level views. Firefly brings in infrastructure from multiple cloud accounts and providers, organizing them as systems in your catalog and enabling account-level filtering—giving teams a unified view without switching contexts.
5. Platform Self-Service with Operational Context
Backstage already promotes self-service workflows for developers. With Firefly embedded, those workflows are now enriched with real cloud context—so developers can explore what exists, what’s drifted, and what’s missing IaC coverage, all without needing access to cloud consoles or external tools.
Getting Started with Firefly’s Backstage Plugin
You can find an end-to-end explanation for how to get started with the Backstage plugin, in our docs — but just so you have an idea of how easy it is.
Installing the plugin takes just a few steps:
- Install the backend and frontend packages via yarn.
- Authenticate using your Firefly API credentials.
- Configure the plugin in app-config.yaml with your import rules and intervals.
- Add the plugin route and UI cards to your Backstage app.
From there, you’ll start seeing cloud data populate your catalog, including relationships, metrics, and IaC coverage—all powered by Firefly.
Best Practices for Maximum Impact
To get the most value out of the plugin, keep these tips in mind:
- Use consistent tagging across cloud assets to improve component correlation.
- Filter for only the resources you care about to avoid noisy catalogs.
- Add IaC coverage cards to all key entity pages so developers never miss important context.
- Set a realistic interval for syncs to balance freshness with performance.
A Smarter Way to Connect Cloud Reality with Developer Workflows
The Firefly Backstage plugin is about more than integration — it’s about alignment. It brings together the structured service catalog of Backstage with the real-time state of your cloud infrastructure, enabling teams to operate with better awareness, fewer blind spots, and more confidence in the systems they own and run.
By embedding Firefly directly into Backstage, platform teams no longer have to choose between visibility and simplicity. They get both: in the place they already work.
To get started, check out the installation guide or watch the demo and bring cloud context to your catalog.
