Backstage? I thought you were doing software engineering!

In today's fast-paced software development world, managing complex infrastructures, tools, and workflows can be a significant challenge. As organizations scale, the need for an organized, efficient, and user-friendly platform to centralize these elements becomes increasingly critical. This is where Backstage comes into play—a framework that has quickly gained traction as a key solution for building internal development portals.

The Origin of Backstage

Backstage was originally conceived and developed by Spotify, one of the world's largest music streaming platforms. Spotify's engineering teams faced the daunting task of managing thousands of microservices, each with its own set of tools, documentation, and dependencies. As these services grew, so did the complexity of managing them. To address this, Spotify created Backstage as an internal tool to streamline their development processes, improve collaboration, and enhance productivity.

What started as a proprietary solution soon caught the attention of the broader tech community. Recognizing its potential, Spotify decided to open-source Backstage, making it available to any organization facing similar challenges.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Backstage

In 2020, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted Backstage as a Sandbox project. The CNCF's endorsement marked a significant milestone, signaling Backstage's potential to become a critical tool in the cloud-native ecosystem. The Sandbox status also provided Backstage with a platform to grow its community, attract contributors, and mature as a project.

Since joining the CNCF, Backstage has seen rapid adoption across various industries, from tech giants to startups. Its flexibility and extensibility make it an attractive option for organizations looking to create custom portals tailored to their unique needs.

Why Backstage?

At its core, Backstage is a framework that enables organizations to build internal development portals. These portals act as a centralized hub where developers can access everything they need to build, deploy, and manage software efficiently. But what makes Backstage stand out?

1. Centralization of Resources: Backstage brings all the tools, services, and documentation a team needs into one place. This reduces the time spent searching for information and tools, allowing developers to focus on coding and problem-solving.
2. Standardization: With Backstage, organizations can enforce best practices and standards across their development teams. By providing a consistent interface and workflow, Backstage helps reduce the friction that often comes with managing diverse tools and services.
3. Customization: One of Backstage's biggest strengths is its flexibility. Organizations can build plugins to extend its functionality, ensuring that the portal fits their specific needs. Whether it's integrating with internal tools, third-party services, or custom-built solutions, Backstage can be adapted to fit any environment.
4. Improved Collaboration: By centralizing and standardizing resources, Backstage enhances collaboration across teams. Developers, operations teams, and product managers can all work from the same playbook, leading to more efficient communication and coordination.
5. Open-Source Community: As an open-source project, Backstage benefits from a growing community of contributors who are continuously improving and expanding its capabilities. This collaborative approach ensures that Backstage remains relevant and up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies.

Backstage and the Rise of Platform Engineering

The popularity of Backstage has grown in tandem with the rise of platform engineering. Platform engineering focuses on creating and maintaining the underlying systems and environments that enable software development teams to build, deploy, and operate applications effectively.

As organizations recognize the importance of platform engineering, they increasingly seek tools that can simplify the management of these platforms. Backstage fits this need perfectly, offering a way to centralize and streamline the myriad tools and processes involved in software development.

With Backstage, platform engineering teams can create portals that provide developers with everything they need in a single interface. This not only reduces the cognitive load on developers but also ensures that best practices are consistently applied across the organization.

Why an Internal Development Platform is Crucial—Especially for Large Organizations

In today's competitive landscape, efficiency and collaboration aren't just nice-to-haves; they’re necessities. As companies grow, so does the complexity of their software development processes. This is where an internal development platform, like Backstage, becomes invaluable—offering a centralized solution that can benefit almost any company, but particularly larger ones.

The Challenges of Scale

Large organizations often grapple with a range of challenges that come with scale. With multiple teams working on various projects, sometimes across different geographies, maintaining consistency, efficiency, and quality can become increasingly difficult. These challenges typically include:

• Tool Sprawl: Over time, large companies tend to accumulate a variety of tools, each serving a specific purpose. While each tool may be effective on its own, the sheer number of them can lead to inefficiencies. Developers may waste time searching for the right tool, learning how to use it, or trying to integrate it with other systems.
• Fragmented Knowledge: As organizations grow, so does the volume of documentation, best practices, and tribal knowledge. This information often becomes siloed, making it difficult for teams to access the knowledge they need when they need it. This fragmentation can lead to duplicated efforts, inconsistent practices, and slower onboarding for new team members.
• Inconsistent Workflows: Different teams might develop their own workflows and processes, leading to inconsistencies across the organization. This can create bottlenecks, reduce productivity, and make it difficult to implement organization-wide improvements or innovations.
• Collaboration Barriers: In large organizations, teams are often spread out across various departments, regions, or even countries. This geographical and departmental separation can create barriers to effective communication and collaboration, resulting in misaligned goals and delayed project timelines.

The Power of Centralization

An internal development platform like Backstage addresses these challenges by centralizing resources, tools, and knowledge into a single, accessible portal. This centralization offers several key benefits:

• Streamlined Tooling: By consolidating all necessary tools into a unified platform, Backstage eliminates the inefficiencies caused by tool sprawl. Developers can access everything they need from a single interface, reducing the time spent switching between tools and allowing them to focus on their core tasks.
• Unified Knowledge Base: Backstage provides a centralized repository for documentation, best practices, and other essential information. This ensures that all teams have access to the same, up-to-date knowledge, reducing duplication of effort and improving overall consistency across the organization.
• Standardized Workflows: With Backstage, organizations can enforce consistent workflows and processes across teams. This standardization helps to reduce friction, minimize errors, and ensure that best practices are followed throughout the development lifecycle.
• Enhanced Collaboration: By bringing teams together on a single platform, Backstage fosters greater collaboration. Teams can easily share resources, communicate more effectively, and align their efforts towards common goals, regardless of their location or department.

Why Big Companies Benefit the Most

While companies of all sizes can benefit from an internal development platform, the advantages are particularly pronounced for large organizations. The bigger the company, the more complex its operations, and the more critical it becomes to have a system that can manage this complexity effectively.

• Scalability: Large organizations need solutions that can scale with them. Backstage is designed to handle the complexities of large-scale operations, ensuring that as your company grows, your development processes remain efficient and manageable.
• Customizability: Bigger companies often have unique needs that off-the-shelf solutions can't fully address. Backstage's extensibility allows organizations to build custom plugins and integrations that cater specifically to their requirements, making it a flexible choice for complex environments.
• Efficiency at Scale: For large organizations, even small inefficiencies can multiply into significant losses of time and resources. By streamlining processes and centralizing resources, Backstage can drive substantial improvements in efficiency, resulting in faster time-to-market and a stronger competitive edge.
• Risk Mitigation: In large organizations, inconsistent practices and fragmented knowledge can lead to significant risks, including security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and operational failures. Backstage helps mitigate these risks by enforcing consistent standards and providing a single source of truth for all teams.

Backstage Isn’t a Silver Bullet: The Need for Customization

While Backstage offers a powerful foundation for building internal development portals, it's essential to understand that it isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, Backstage isn't designed to be a complete out-of-the-box solution; it's more of a framework—a starting point that requires significant customization and development to truly meet the unique needs of your organization.

The Reality of "Not Batteries Included"

When you first dive into Backstage, you might be struck by its flexibility and the potential it holds. However, this flexibility comes with a caveat: Backstage isn’t "batteries included." Unlike some other tools that come preloaded with all the features and integrations you might need, Backstage provides a framework upon which you need to build.

• Customization Required: To unlock Backstage's full potential, you'll need to invest time and resources into developing your own plugins, integrating your existing tools, and tailoring the portal to fit your specific workflows. This customization can be a double-edged sword—on one hand, it allows you to create a portal that perfectly suits your organization’s needs; on the other, it requires a considerable amount of effort and expertise to get it right.
• Initial Setup and Maintenance: Getting Backstage up and running isn’t as simple as downloading and deploying an application. It requires thoughtful planning, implementation, and ongoing maintenance. You’ll need to consider how to best integrate your existing tools and systems, develop custom plugins, and ensure that the platform remains up-to-date and functional as your organization evolves.
• Learning Curve: For teams new to Backstage, there can be a steep learning curve. Developers and platform engineers will need to familiarize themselves with Backstage’s architecture, plugin system, and best practices for customization. This learning curve is not insurmountable, but it does require an investment of time and training.

Building Your Own Platform on Backstage

Given these realities, it’s clear that Backstage is more of a foundation than a finished product. To truly benefit from what Backstage has to offer, organizations need to take an active role in shaping and developing their internal platform. Here’s what that entails:

• Identify Your Needs: Start by thoroughly understanding the specific needs of your organization. What tools do your developers use most frequently? What workflows need to be streamlined? What documentation and resources should be centralized? This analysis will guide how you customize Backstage to serve your teams effectively.
• Develop Custom Plugins: One of Backstage’s strengths is its plugin architecture, which allows you to extend its functionality to meet your needs. However, this also means you’ll need to develop these plugins yourself or adapt existing ones. Whether it’s integrating with internal systems, creating new workflows, or surfacing specific data, custom plugins are key to making Backstage work for you.
• Integrate with Existing Tools: Backstage is designed to integrate with a wide range of tools and services, but these integrations often need to be built or customized. This requires a good understanding of both Backstage and the tools you’re integrating, as well as the ability to manage APIs, authentication, and data flows.
• Ongoing Development and Maintenance: Even after the initial setup, Backstage requires ongoing development and maintenance. Your internal platform needs to evolve with your organization, meaning that new plugins will need to be developed, existing ones maintained, and the platform itself periodically updated to ensure it continues to meet your needs.

Why This Investment is Worth It

While the need for customization and development might seem daunting, it’s important to recognize that this effort is what makes Backstage so powerful. By building on top of Backstage, you’re not just implementing a tool—you’re creating a platform that’s uniquely tailored to your organization’s needs. This kind of customization can lead to significant long-term benefits:

• Better Alignment with Your Workflows: A custom-built platform will naturally align better with your existing workflows, reducing friction and increasing efficiency.
• Scalability: As your organization grows, your platform can evolve alongside it, ensuring that it continues to serve your teams effectively, no matter how large or complex your operations become.
• Competitive Advantage: By creating a platform that’s specifically designed to optimize your development processes, you can gain a competitive edge, allowing your teams to innovate faster and more effectively.

Conclusion

Backstage is not a silver bullet, and it’s true that it requires a significant investment in customization, development, and ongoing maintenance. However, this investment is not just worth it—it's transformative. By taking the time to build your internal development platform on Backstage, you’re setting the stage for a tool that doesn’t just meet your needs but propels your organization forward.

The flexibility and power that Backstage offers are unmatched. It allows you to create a platform that is deeply integrated with your workflows, perfectly aligned with your team’s needs, and scalable as your organization grows. In the fast-paced world of software development, where efficiency, collaboration, and innovation are key, a tailored internal platform can be a game-changer.

For organizations willing to invest the effort, Backstage offers a pathway to a competitive edge—enabling faster, more effective development cycles, and empowering your teams to focus on what they do best: building great software. So, while Backstage isn’t "batteries included," the opportunity it presents is immense. It’s not just about managing your tools; it’s about transforming how you build, innovate, and grow. And that’s an investment worth making.