Deprecating Knative Backstage plugins

[Ali Ok]

Hello Knative community,

The Knative community is considering deprecating the Backstage plugins [0] currently maintained under the Knative organization, and we would like to gather feedback from both developers and users before proceeding.

The Backstage plugins were introduced to provide integration between Knative resources and Backstage-based developer portals. However, these plugins have seen limited adoption and minimal maintenance activity in recent cycles.

Maintaining compatibility with both Knative and Backstage introduces ongoing overhead, and there is currently no active maintainer driving development forward.

We propose to mark the Knative Backstage plugin repositories as deprecated/archived.

Before making a final decision, we would like to better understand real-world usage:

• Are you currently using these plugins (in production or development)?
• Are you aware of any downstream vendors or platforms that ship or depend on them?
• Would deprecation impact your workflows?
• Is there interest in contributing as a maintainer for these plugins?

Unless there are strong objections or active maintainers volunteering to take ownership, we plan to proceed with deprecation following a two-week lazy consensus period from the date of this email.

Thank you for your feedback!

Best regards,
Ali Ok

[0] https://github.com/knative-extensions/backstage-plugins