Today we are announcing a big milestone for Arctir: the general availability of Flightdeck, our self-service, multi-tenant Developer Platform built upon Backstage.

We believe that Internal Developer Portals (IDP), and software catalog's in particular, are fantastic tools for teams just jumping into a Platform Engineering (PE) initiative and even for teams looking to improve on their existing Developer Experience (DX) investments.

As we've engaged with the broader ecosystem, we've also come to believe the de facto standard in this space is, and will continue to be, Backstage.

We see a lot of corollaries between the growth, maturity, and groundswell of interest in Backstage to that of Kubernetes. Much like Kubernetes, Backstage is designed as a powerful framework that provides a solid foundation from which to extend into a broader, full-featured platform. But, also like Kubernetes in its early days, the complexity and operational overhead of rolling your own Backstage portal typically detracts from your core mission: improving developer efficiency and experience.

Installation and configuration of Backstage can be painful resulting in slow adoption, especially for resource constrained teams. We've even heard from large organizations that have abandoned efforts to deploy an IDP, primarily due to the sheer amount of human toil necessary to make these projects successful.

And, for those who have already deployed Backstage, there is the ongoing operational development and support to consider. This can amount to a non-trivial amount of work...work that, again, is not core to your immediate business needs.

We're here to change that

Flightdeck is a fully multi-tenant SaaS offering that allows multi-phase deployment of Backstage. We include all the Backstage functionality - software catalog, plugins, scaffolder and more. Better still with Flightdeck you can create instances for test, production, or even different business units across geographical regions. Get started with a secure, fully-operational Backstage deployment in minutes; not months or years.

The platform is built API-first. Every aspect of Flightdeck may be manipulated by way of interfacing with our RESTful OpenAPI schema, complete with a handful of SDKs to match your toolchain preferences. And for those who, like us, are strong believers in the principles of Infrastructure as Code, our Terraform provider will allow you to treat your Flightdeck instances like any of your other managed resources: in git.

And, of course we also have a web interface to make it easy to get started.

Like you, we've been in the trenches designing, developing and maintaining Enterprise-grade solutions, so we've included the features we know you'll need:

• Bring Your Own Identity - we don't want you to maintain yet another user identity provider, so bring your own. Flightdeck will seamlessly interface with your LDAP, Active Directory, OIDC, or even federated identity providers like Github, Gitlab, and Google.
• Plugins and More Plugins - Flightdeck comes stocked with the latest versions of the most popular community plugins and we are adding more in every release. Have your own plugins? We got you there too, reach out for details.
• Secure Connectivity - we know you have internal infrastructure that demands secure connectivity, so we have included Tailscale connectors to allow for fine-grained access to the systems you require. And, this is just the start, we are actively adding new connectors to fit every deployment requirement.
• Bring Your Own Domain - while we think our domains are pretty awesome, you probably want your own...who wouldn't? Bring the domain of your choice, and we'll handle the rest.
• Secrets That Are...Secret - all of the secrets that power your portal are maintained in a secure, enterprise grade secrets manager. For Enterprise customers, this backend is pluggable: bring your own secrets manager and we'll do the heavy lifting.
• Automatic Upgrades - it sucks to realize that your infrastructure is 2 years beyond its end-of-life date. Flightdeck automatically maintains your portal instance versions to ensure that you always have the latest features and security updates.
• On-premises Deployments - for our Enterprise customers we've built everything in a manner that may be deployed on-premises. Years of experience has taught us that while cloud-first is desirable for many reasons, not everyone can go there. We'll meet you where you are.

...this, and so much more.

This is just the beginning

We are incredibly excited to release Flightdeck to our users but we are even more excited for what we have in store in the coming months.

Get started today: https://arctir.com/pricing

Have questions? Want to learn more about where we're headed? Let's talk: https://calendly.com/d/cmft-w7v-mv4/arctir-intro