Software Catalog
What is the Backstage Software Catalog?
The Backstage Software Catalog is a centralized system that keeps track of ownership and metadata for all the software in your ecosystem. It's built around the concept of metadata yaml files stored together with the code, which are then harvested and visualized in Backstage.
You can think of the Software Catalog as an inventory of for tracking of all your services, websites, libraries, data pipelines, ML models, or any other software that makes your business tick. With the Software Catalog you can find metadata about your software like the name, which team owns the software, whether it’s production-ready or experimental, and more.
However, the Software Catalog isn’t just an inventory. It also tracks relationships between software, creating more of a software graph than a spreadsheet. You can know that a given service depends on a database and Kafka topic, the shared libraries it uses, and the broader software system it’s a part of.
Watch this explainer video to see the Backstage Software Catalog in action.
Software Catalog benefits
- Manage all your software in one place: Backstage allows you to manage your company’s services, whether it’s a handful or several thousand.
- Discoverability and accountability: You can easily find software and services that you and your team own, and just as waisly you can identify who is responsible for any piece of technology in your company.
- A uniform overview: Every team can see all the services they own and related resources (deployments, data pipelines, pull request status, etc.).
- Plugins ❤️ metadata: Backstages plugin architecture can integrate with the Software Catalog’s metadata and pull in other management features like resource monitoring and testing.
- Helps scale engineering organizations: The Software Catalog scales alongside your organization, allowing you to keep track of all the software inside your ecosystem. Enjoy the same benefits whether you’re a large Fortune 500 company or you’re just starting out.