New Harness IDP Release, Giving Teams a Smarter Way to Power Developer Portals at Scale

Platform teams are under pressure to move quickly without losing control. Traditional developer portals promised to solve this, but engineers still face bottlenecks with complexity, scale, and fragmented experiences. 

Today, that changes.

With this major release of Harness IDP, we’re redefining what an enterprise-grade internal developer portal can be. Extended from the Backstage framework and supercharged for scale, Harness IDP now delivers real-time Git synchronization, true org-level hierarchy, API-first extensibility, and the most powerful RBAC system in the category.

Whether you’re supporting 100s or 1,000s of developers, Harness IDP gives platform teams the structure, speed, and control they need to transform developer experience at the enterprise level – without compromise.

Optimizing the Backstage framework for the Enterprise

When we started building Harness IDP in 2022, we extended the Backstage framework, a popular Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, by adding several capabilities designed to make it easier for enterprise teams to configure, adopt, maintain, and scale their developer portal.

After working closely with platform teams at enterprise organizations, one thing became clear: while Backstage is great for smaller teams without stringent requirements for access control or scalability, its architecture has limitations for enterprises that need a more structured and scalable portal with fine-grained access control. 

Fortunately, the Harness platform is already designed to support these needs! With this release, we’ve addressed those limits head-on, introducing new features that unlock adoption and provide the structure, security, and automation needed to support thousands of developers and teams in their journey as they adopt the portal. 

Delivering Enterprise Scale with Unprecedented Control

Organize Entities into the Harness-Native Platform Hierarchy

Harness IDP now aligns with our native platform hierarchy, enabling teams to create catalog entities and workflows at the Project, Organization, or Account level. This mirrors how engineering teams are actually structured—by product line, business unit, or geography—so developers see only what’s relevant to their work. 

Take a global retailer, for example: the mobile teams supporting their European storefront can now view and manage only the services tied to their org, while platform leads at the account level maintain governance across all lines of business. The result: cleaner interfaces, faster onboarding, and fewer mistakes.

Fine-Grained RBAC

In large organizations, access boundaries must be explicit. IDP now supports entity-level granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), so platform teams can define exactly who can read, create, edit, delete, or execute a given service or workflow. 

For companies in regulated industries, like financial services or healthcare, this level of control is essential for compliance and risk management. Imagine a company whose services require restricted access due to regulatory constraints. With RBAC, only the compliance engineering team can modify those entities, while broader developer groups can view, but not alter, related documentation or dependencies. 

Real-time, Scalable Git Experience

For organizations with large, distributed engineering teams, keeping the developer portal in sync with Git can quickly become a bottleneck. Harness IDP now supports real-time updates via webhooks when YAML config files are updated in Git, eliminating the need for polling or manual refreshes. Teams can also make edits directly in the portal UI and push those changes back however they prefer, either directly or through a pull request. Authentication is flexible, with support for OAuth and central tokens, and it works with all major Git providers.

Take any SaaS company with dozens of teams and hundreds of services. As the organization scales, it gets harder to keep the catalog current and performant. By setting up different Git connectors for specific entities or groups of services, platform teams can stay in control, avoid API rate limits, and maintain real-time updates – even as the catalog grows into the tens of thousands.

Modern, Customizable Catalog UX

With this release, the IDP catalog has been redesigned for speed, clarity, and scale. Teams can now filter views based on what matters to them, like services they own or APIs used across the organization. Scorecards are now built directly into the catalog view, giving developers and platform teams immediate visibility into key metrics like service maturity, security standards alignment, and production readiness. Each entity page clearly shows scope, ownership, and references, making it easier for teams to stay organized and aligned. 

We know that many engineers spend too much time digging through disorganized service lists just to find the information they need. Now, they can quickly filter by team, check ownership, and get a real-time view of what’s up to standard and what needs attention.

Accelerating Adoption with Flexible Entity Creation

UI-Driven Entity Management

Catalog entities can now be created and managed directly through the Harness IDP UI using a guided, form-based experience – no YAML required. This removes a major barrier for developers unfamiliar with configuration syntax, making it easier for more teams to get started and contribute. For those who prefer a config-as-code workflow, the traditional YAML-in-Git approach is still fully supported.

Take a fast-growing company who needs more bandwidth quickly. Their new engineers can now onboard and register services in the portal on day 1 – no Git access or YAML knowledge required. That self-serve experience helps the platform team reduce bottlenecks and accelerate adoption across squads.

API-Based Catalog Management

While UI is great for onboarding or making quick updates, large-scale adoption often demands automation. Harness IDP now includes new APIs to create and manage catalog entities, unlocking use cases like auto-discovery, auto-population, CLI integration, and Terraform provider support. The existing Catalog Ingestion API remains unchanged and will continue to function as before. 

Take a customer in financial services. With the new APIs, the platform team can now automatically add new services to the portal as they’re created, complete with the right owner and tags. This keeps the catalog up to date without any manual work.

Continued Support for Backstage Plugins

Harness IDP continues to extend the Backstage open-source framework, so teams can keep using the Backstage plugin ecosystem they already know, or build their own custom plugins. Best of both worlds! 

Want to See It in Action?

Interested in seeing more? We’re hosting a live walkthrough of the new release – what’s new, how it works, and how teams can use Harness IDP to scale adoption across their organizations. 

‍View the Launch Webinar here!

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