Why I am Excited by Backstage

Backstage is fast becoming the de facto tool for building Developer Portals (and a more expansive “Developer Platform” thereafter). You may have seen the demos of quickly scaffolding an application so that it’s all ready to deploy production with the first commit. It’s a classic golden path setup that gets people moving quickly - and in the right, secure way. That’s pretty neat.

Yet, I believe scaffolding and automation as the least part of Backstage. I am more excited by the visibility aspect of it. Internal Developer Portals such as Backstage map out the terrain of your software systems, showing the interconnectedness of all those moving parts. And further - it allows you to extend that map and model to more exactly match your organization, provided you put the work in.

Last week I attended an excellent Backstage meetup organised by Alliander, alongside a large number of engineers from some very well known names in the Netherlands. The majority were years deep in their Backstage/Developer platform journeys, and based on the stories they shared, I can expand the visibility benefits further:

Backstage is an anti-silo-ization tool. In many companies, the software and information systems are so complex that most engineers are forced to contract their vision to just their technology silo (and the components adjacent) because expanding that vision is just so hard. “So hard” in this case is just overcoming the friction required to know a simple fact: who owns what. In many orgs this information is the subject of rumour and hearsay, accumulated like lore over time by those who have stuck around.

Once you have the map to who-knows-what, you can start navigating between the various systems. What should naturally happen is that your engineers stop seeing the rest of the organization as an unknowable black box, and rather see it as something they can reasonably interact with. Not take responsibility for, obviously, but at least interact.

In my experience, the biggest improvements you can make are usually visibility based (of the real systems, not just metrics). With this in mind, I see Backstage and developer portals in general are a vital solution in companies struggling with organizational and system complexity.