Sponsored Session: Bridging Open Source Developer Platforms: Backstage Meets Coder

### Overview In this sponsored session, Tim Quinlan, a technical marketing manager at Coder, explores how integrating Coder with Spotify's Backstage project bridges open-source developer platforms. Backstage acts as an extensible developer portal framework (a CNCF project) providing service catalogs, documentation, and scaffolders, but typically lacks direct runtime developer environment provisioning and configuration. Coder, an open-source platform founded in 2017 licensed under AGPL, provides cloud development environments (CDEs) defined via Terraform. The talk demonstrates how Coder's newly released Backstage plugin links the developer portal directly to self-service, standardized, containerized, or VM-based workspaces.

### Key Topics - **Developer Portals vs. Cloud Development Environments**: Backstage serves as a framework to build internal developer portals, covering planning, testing, deploying, operations, and compliance. However, developer surveys indicate software engineers spend the largest portion of their time writing code and configuring dev tools—two areas traditionally unaddressed by Backstage alone. - **Coder's Open Source Ecosystem**: Overview of Coder’s projects, including its flagship Coder platform, `code-server` (VS Code running in a web browser), Code Marketplace, and IDE plugins (JetBrains, VS Code, Backstage). - **Ingredients for Successful Platform Deployments**: Both Backstage and Coder deployments require starting with a focused core team, cataloging critical business services rather than edge cases, leadership buy-in for establishing organizational "golden paths," and developer enablement via inner sourcing and self-service. - **Dev Containers and Templates**: Workspaces in Coder are templated via Terraform. Using Dev Containers allows senior developers to define container specifications (Dockerfiles, JSON configs) directly in code repositories, enabling consistent onboarding with zero client-side configuration.

### Technical Details - **Templating via Terraform**: Coder provisions developer environments across Kubernetes pods, VMs, or cloud providers through Terraform scripts. Startup scripts can execute runtime configurations, such as verifying and registering IDE backends (like IntelliJ or PyCharm) or launching `code-server`. - **Backstage Integration**: Using Backstage's scaffolder and component registration, a project repository containing a `catalog-info.yaml` file and `.devcontainer` configuration can be imported into Backstage. With the Coder plugin, users can click a link to trigger a Coder workspace build immediately using the specified template and Dev Container Dockerfile. - **Data Persistence and Lifecycle**: Workspaces persist user home directories using Kubernetes persistent volumes (PVs). If a workspace is stopped or idled, the home directory remains preserved and is remounted on restart. Enterprise tiers provide dormancy rules to clean up unused compute resources. - **Security and Resource Offloading**: Workspaces run entirely on remote infrastructure, preventing sensitive source code from resting on local developer laptops and eliminating "works on my machine" issues.

### Takeaways - **Closing the Developer Lifecycle Gap**: Integrating Coder into Backstage bridges the gap between cataloging services and actually writing code, saving estimated days on onboarding and eliminating ongoing environment drift. - **Flexibility and Community**: Because Coder uses Terraform, environments can scale from simple single-container instances to multi-service Kubernetes namespaces. Coder also supports OpenTofu following Terraform's licensing shifts, and the Backstage plugin remains an active, open-source effort seeking community feedback.