Dev Review of backstage.io

Purpose

Identify gaps and opportunities to learn from backstage.io.

Backstage is a developer platform developed by Spotify in order to increase the productivity of their teams. This platform is an umbrella for the many tools they use in their development life cycle and address both dev needs and infrastructure needs. They have open-sourced the tool and have a lot of interest.

Interesting Learnings

They create Docs in Markdown as part of the code. When a code gets refactored, so do the docs
Project templates are a library you can choose from (for example for creating a BE service, documentation, a website etc.). The platform team labels the recommended template with a label "Golden path"
Templates are open-source. Anyone can contribute
There is a squad page showing what the team owns. This includes
- Cycle time
- Incidents
- Security issues
- Cloud Cost
- Test Coverage
There are plugins built into backstage surfacing this info.
There is a concept of team ownership. The team that created the software is responsible for the software
They use backstage for organizational processes - for example migrating from python 2 to python 3 - they add a coverage chart to show each team's (that owns projects/libraries etc.) progress in migration in addition to the company wide progress
Each service has metadata associated to it - PagerDuty/efficiency/test coverage/environment etc.
Each service has a team and an individual that owns it (this is coded in)
All the software lives in a single catalog that is easily searchable
Each team that uses a specific tool is responsible for writing a plugin that surfaces the info into backstage including the UI
They have the concept of a team. Team page consolidates all the services that the team owns