Spotify Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. It provides a set of TypeScript libraries that can be composed together to build a developer portal for your engineering organization.
It was created inside Spotify and used there for a few years before being open-sourced in 2020. It is now a CNCF Incubating project. It combines a service catalog with a developer portal UI in order to improve engineering effectiveness and overall happiness.
Spotify Backstage can help you tackle a number of different engineering challenges.
- It collects software, tools, teams, people, and other assets into one place where they can be easily searched and organized. This helps improve discoverability.
- It tracks teams and software assets and makes it easy to create a clear linkage between them.
- It makes it easy to define pre-approved templates and create new software from them. This speeds up the software development process and improves production reliability and homogeneity.
- It is the perfect place to detect when an engineering standard is not being upheld and it can nudge teams in a better direction.
The main features of Spotify Backstage include a software catalog, a framework for building plugins, a place to store technical documentation (TechDocs), Software templates and a scaffolder to run them, and a Kubernetes plugin for providing visibility into how services operate there.
There are two main ways to get started with Spotify Backstage. You can self-host the open-source project, or you can use a SaaS provider such as Roadie.