Backstage, originally developed at Spotify, has become the de facto standard for building developer portals. It solves the discovery problem—how do developers find and understand services?
The Service Catalog
At its core, Backstage provides a service catalog:
apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
name: payment-service
description: Handles payment processing
spec:
type: service
owner: payments-team
lifecycle: production
Software Templates
Scaffolding new projects consistently:
- Choose a template
- Fill in parameters
- Get a working project with CI/CD, monitoring, and documentation
TechDocs
Documentation lives with code and renders in Backstage. No more hunting for outdated wikis.
Plugin Ecosystem
Backstage's plugin architecture lets you integrate anything—cloud providers, monitoring tools, security scanners.