As the number of services grows, an invisible but expensive problem appears: no one knows the whole system any more. Where are the docs for a service? Who owns it? How do you run it locally? What are its dependencies? The answers live in heads, personal notes and chat threads — and evaporate when someone goes on holiday or leaves the company.
Spotify’s Backstage solves this as a single developer portal — one entry point into the company’s entire engineering reality. It rests on a few ideas, each closing a specific pain.
The Software Catalog lists every service, library and pipeline with explicit owners. Open a service and you immediately see the owning team, links, dependencies and status. “Whose is this and who do I ask” stops being a quest.
TechDocs is documentation as code: it lives in the repository next to the service, is reviewed together with it and is published to the portal automatically. So docs stop going stale in a separate wiki everyone has forgotten.
Software Templates (the scaffolder) are blueprints for new components. A new service is created in a couple of clicks, already wired with CI/CD, linters, structure and documentation. This is what people call a “golden path”: the right way becomes the easiest way.
On top sit plugins: monitoring, CI/CD, cloud resources, feature flags and whatever matters to the team, gathered into one interface instead of a dozen tabs. The portal extends to fit a specific company’s infrastructure.
After adopting Backstage we centralised documentation, the catalogue and tooling — onboarding of new developers sped up noticeably, and “tribal knowledge” became a browsable, living catalogue. In one line: a developer portal is about finding, not asking.