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Comment by jakswa | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to infer from some quick documentation-reading whether kubernetes is required to enjoy a lot of the described benefits. Feels like a big first step: "Adopt kubernetes." Having been at a medium-sized org leaning into kubernetes, I can see the draw of a system like this, especially for non-IC roles.

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No, that's not needed. There's a K8S plugin for Backstage that can link your deployments to the services in Backstage's service catalog, which is useful. But that's pretty much the only part of Backstage that would "require" Kubernetes.

Isn't the only thing required for Backstage a GitHub account? It's been a while but I remember GitLab not having the same feature parity and OSS alternatives like Gitea being completely left in the dust. Kinda disappointing if this is still the case, that an OS tool requires corporate owned software to use but I suppose life is full of jokes.

No, there's no requirement for any kind of source control at all. If you do have source control in your company (and, if so, welcome to the 1990s!) you can set it up in such a way that all your repos get scanned for metadata that gets ingested into the software catalog. There's implementations for GitHub and Gitlab (I built that one at $PREV_JOB) and others. Also, other kind of metadata, like user and group information, can come from sources like LDAP, Azure AD, etc.

To be clear, Backstage is not an alternative to Gitea, Github or anything like that. It's not a source code repository hosting tool.

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