Backstage for All

20 MINS

What is Backstage?

Backstage is an open framework for building internal developer portals (IDPs). We created Backstage at Spotify to give our teams a better experience managing, creating, and exploring our software ecosystem.

The framework was open sourced in March 2020 — and it was a hit. Spotify donated the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) later that same year. Today over 3,000 companies have adopted Backstage for their own IDPs.

Want to learn what all the fuss is about? Watch this short explainer video to learn how a Backstage portal can improve developer experience and productivity across your entire org.

Why?

We at Spotify have always believed that speed and ingenuity comes from having autonomous development teams. But as we learned firsthand, the faster you grow, the more fragmented and complex your software ecosystem becomes. To tame the chaos and channel our energy where it matters, we built a developer portal at Spotify — what you now know as Backstage.

In essence, Backstage at Spotify enables:

  • Speed without compromising security and reliability
  • Scale without compromising quality
  • The ability to tame Spotify's increasingly chaotic software ecosystem

What?

A developer portal that is one frontend for your entire infrastructure, regardless of how or where the individual components are actually running, or who manages them. Integrating:

  • Tooling: CI/CD, Kubernetes monitoring, security tools (Snyk), testing (Lighthouse), etc.
  • Services/Applications/Data: Basically all the software and data that your teams build and manage
  • Docs: For components, APIs, libraries as well as tutorials, guides, org charts, and system diagrams

In short

Backstage helps you and your team manage and maintain the software you own. You get a uniform view of all their software; services, libraries, websites, ML models — you name it, Backstage knows all about it. It makes all the software in your company, and who owns it, discoverable.

Backstage makes it easy to:

  • Create new software in seconds, aligned to your best practices
  • Manage all the software you own in one centralized location
  • Explore the entire software ecosystem, enabling collaboration across your organization