I've been following Backstage since Spotify open-sourced it in 2020. By 2023 it has been adopted by hundreds of organisations including large enterprises and cloud providers. The CNCF graduated it in 2022. What's interesting is how it went from an internal tool to an industry standard.
The problem Backstage addresses is a common one: service ownership and discoverability at scale. When you're running hundreds or thousands of services, finding who owns a service, what its dependencies are, where its documentation lives, what its current deployment status is, and what APIs it exposes becomes difficult. Backstage provides a single place to find all this information via a software catalog that pulls from CI/CD systems, source control, and infrastructure providers.
I've seen many organisations struggle with this problem, and it's not uncommon to see teams spend weeks or even months trying to track down service owners or dependencies. For example, at one company I worked with, it took over 6 months to create a comprehensive service catalog, but it ended up saving them over 30% of their development time. Backstage's ability to integrate with existing systems like GitHub, Kubernetes, and PagerDuty makes it a powerful tool for solving this problem.
Backstage's plugin architecture is key to its success. Every integration is a plugin, whether it's Kubernetes status, GitHub Actions runs, PagerDuty on-call rotations, Sonar code quality scores, or cloud cost data. The community has built over 200 plugins, and because the frontend framework is consistent, plugins integrate visually as well as functionally.
One of the challenges of implementing Backstage is choosing the right plugins for your organisation. With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to decide which ones to prioritise. For example, I worked with a company that had a large Java ecosystem, so they prioritised plugins for integrating with their Java-based CI/CD tools. They ended up building over 20 custom plugins to support their specific use cases.
One of the most useful features of Backstage is its software templates. Platform teams can publish curated starting points for new services, including everything from project scaffolding to CI/CD pipeline configuration, monitoring setup, and Backstage catalog entry. This is what's called the golden path concept: making the right way to start a new service also the easiest way.
Implementing Backstage well requires significant investment. You need to populate the catalog from existing systems, build or integrate the plugins relevant to your stack, and maintain the templates as your practices evolve. The organisations that get the most value from Backstage are those that commit engineering time to make it accurate and complete.
A partially populated Backstage catalog that developers learn to distrust is worse than no catalog. This is why investment is crucial. The payoff is worth it, though: when done right, Backstage provides a single source of truth for all services, making it easier for developers to find what they need and get started with new projects.
The fact that the CNCF graduated Backstage in 2022 is a testament to its widespread adoption and usefulness. It's not just a tool for large enterprises, either: any organisation running multiple services can benefit from the visibility and standardisation it provides.
I've seen firsthand how Backstage can simplify service ownership and discoverability. By providing a single place to find all the information you need, it makes it easier for developers to focus on what matters: building and delivering software.