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On a technical level, Spotify Backstage is a collection of TypeScript libraries which can be combined together to create a Developer Portal. The Catalog allows users to “look up” internal systems to find information about them. It also includes groups of humans, who can own software in the Catalog.
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In Backstage, this can include services, systems, resources such as S3 buckets, and other concepts. It can be thought of as a single pane of glass, or a hub for software development.Ī service catalog, or software catalog, is a list of all of the internal software assets available inside a company. It allows developers to understand what other teams are working on and how their environments are running. Spotify Backstage provides a centralized place to look up information about their tooling, services and architecture. It aspires to improve software development effectiveness by helping developers focus on what they do best. By January 2023, Backstage is used by more than 600 organizations (700%+ growth in 2022).Īn Internal Developer Portal is a portal that helps developers make sense of their engineering ecosystem. Originally written by Spotify, Backstage is now an open platform for building Internal Developer Portals donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Backstage is the open-source market leader for creating an IDP. These factors have derived the need for an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) where developers can navigate their stacks and resources. Tech stacks are becoming more complex, leading to longer onboarding times and more complicated collaboration processes.
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Practices like microservice, Software-as-a-Service reliance, serverless, and no-code have resulted in a more chaotic ecosystem for developers.
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