Watch our Backstage talk at KubeCon NA 2021

In our KubeCon + CloudNativeCon talk, “Shifting Spotify Engineering from Spreadsheets to Backstage,” Johan Haals (@jhaals) and I (@Rugvip) trace the technical evolution of Backstage inside Spotify.

We take you on a trip all the way back to the Stone Ages, circa 2010, a primitive time when Backstage didn’t exist and Spotify’s engineering resources were still being tracked with spreadsheets.

Then we’ll bring you all the way up to the present day, showing how the open source version of Backstage was built with customization in mind. Thinking about adopting Backstage for your engineering teams? Don’t miss our tips for getting started at the end of our presentation!

Is your bookmark bar filled to the brim with links to internal infrastructure tools? Are you using spreadsheets to track the state of your software and infrastructure? Does your company suffer from fragmentation, like hundreds of startups glued together? Then this talk is for you! It will tell the story of how Spotify created a service catalog to bring order to thousands of microservices. It grew to become Backstage, an internal developer portal supporting not just services, but also machine learning models, documentation, over 9000 data pipelines, and much more. With 115 plugins contributed by 58 different teams, Backstage is now Spotify’s single pane of glass for the entire engineering organization. In 2020 Backstage and its software catalog was open sourced and donated to the CNCF, making it available for everyone to use. The talk will also walk you through strategies for adopting Backstage in an existing organization, and how to bootstrap your own catalog.