Backstage for All

20 MINS

What is Backstage?

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. It was created at Spotify, to give our developers a better experience managing, creating and exploring our software ecosystem.

It was open-sourced during Spotify's internal Hack Week in March 2020. Since, it has been donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Watch this short explainer video going over what is Backstage and what makes it special.

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