CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2025

Backstage templates are an incredibly powerful tool. They are also one of the hardest to get right. You create a template - all the best practices and tooling, it’s PERFECT! Then two days pass, and it’s out of date. The next time you use it, there are outdated dependencies, CVEs and broken tests.

Why is maintaining templates so painful? For all their power, the development cycle can be excruciatingly slow. Package managers and CI/CD pipelines break when they encounter a filename containing a templated string. You have to validate changes by running the entire template and examining the output.

At ITHAKA, we’ve solved this with something we call “exemplar” templates. With a shockingly simple custom action, we create templates from running, deployable example projects - our “exemplars”. Then we can use standard tooling like Yarn and Renovate to proactively maintain them. In this talk I will share our templating journey and how you can start using “exemplar” projects for your templates.