The Problem Self-Service Solves#

Developers need infrastructure: databases, caches, message queues, storage buckets, DNS records. In most organizations, getting these means filing a ticket, waiting days for someone to provision, and receiving credentials in a Slack DM. This bottleneck incentivizes workarounds — manual console provisioning, skipped security configs, everything crammed into shared databases.

Self-service infrastructure lets developers provision what they need directly, within guardrails the platform team defines. Choose a resource from a catalog, fill in parameters, and the system provisions it and returns connection details. No tickets, no waiting.

What Backstage Provides#

Backstage is an open-source developer portal originally built by Spotify, now a CNCF Incubating project. It serves as the single UI layer for an internal developer platform, unifying the service catalog, documentation, scaffolding templates, and plugin-based integrations behind one interface. It does not replace your tools — it provides a consistent frontend for discovering and interacting with them.

The core components:

• Software Catalog: A registry of all services, libraries, APIs, and infrastructure components, populated from YAML descriptor files in your repositories.
• TechDocs: Documentation-as-code powered by MkDocs, rendered directly in the Backstage UI alongside the service it describes.
• Scaffolder: A template engine that creates new projects from predefined templates — repositories, CI pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, and all.
• Plugins: Backstage’s extension mechanism. The community provides plugins for Kubernetes, ArgoCD, PagerDuty, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and hundreds of other tools.

Installation#

Backstage requires Node.js 18+ and Yarn. Create a new Backstage app: