Docs · Tower

Tower

Release orchestration and operational intelligence for Backstage.

Tower is a Backstage plugin that brings visibility and control to cloud-native platforms built on Crossplane, ArgoCD, and Tekton. It provides release orchestration, promotion workflows, and operational dashboards for managing infrastructure-as-code deployments.

Part of the Hangar Internal Developer Platform ecosystem.

Features

Tabs, in the order of a change’s lifecycle: Overview, Pull Requests, Pipelines, Deployments, Releases, Topology, Images, SLOs, Notifications, App Configuration, Glidepath. Plus a fleet-wide dashboard.

• Release Records: structured release history, persisted as git commits, with compare and export
• Release matrix: which release is live in which environment, along the app’s real promotion order
• Deployments (“Ground Control”): pipeline DAG per environment, rollout topology, ArgoCD Refresh and Sync, Tekton Re-run and Cancel
• Pull requests and checks: the PRs in flight and their gates
• App Configuration and Glidepath: edit an app’s environment values and cicd.yaml through a real GitOps PR, never a direct commit
• SLOs, topology, images: burn rate, live objects, artifact catalog
• Fleet dashboards: Fleet Grid and Ops Wall

Quick Links

• Installation Guide — Getting Tower running in your Backstage instance
• Architecture — How Tower is structured and designed
• Components Reference — Details on each major component
• Patches — Backstage customizations applied by Tower
• Brand — the mark and its files

Related Projects

• Hangar — IDP core platform
• Glidepath — CI/CD engine (Tekton, PaC, cosign)
• Airframe — Crossplane XRDs and Compositions
• Autopilot — runs AI agent workloads with bounded authority; a Tower Agent tab is planned