Backstage

Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals, created at Spotify in 2016 and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation where it graduated to incubation status. The framework emerged from what Spotify internally called the Speed Paradox, where rapid team autonomy led to infrastructure fragmentation that eventually slowed everything down. Backstage solves this through three core components. The Software Catalog provides a centralized registry of all software in the organization including services, websites, libraries, data pipelines, and ML models, with automated entity discovery and relationships between components, tracked through a declarative information model stored in YAML or JSON. The Software Templates feature enables creating golden paths, standardized project scaffolding tools that generate new services with correct CI/CD, monitoring, documentation, and compliance configuration baked in, reducing new service setup time from days to minutes. TechDocs implements the docs-like-code philosophy, building documentation from Markdown files stored alongside source code into a searchable, navigable site with automatic cross-referencing between catalog entities and their docs. The plugin architecture is central to the design, with over 200 community plugins in the marketplace covering CI/CD status from Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and Argo CD, Kubernetes resource inspection, Lighthouse CI audits, cost tracking, incident management, on-call schedules via PagerDuty, security scanning results, and Tech Radar visualizations. The Search Platform unifies search across all plugins and entities. Organizations like Netflix, Expedia, American Airlines, and Visa use Backstage to manage thousands of services. Open source under the Apache 2.0 license.