Why a Service Catalog Exists#

A service catalog answers: “What do we have, who owns it, and what state is it in?” Without one, this information lives in tribal knowledge and stale wiki pages. When an incident hits at 3 AM, the on-call engineer needs to know who owns the failing service, what it depends on, and where to find the runbook. The catalog provides this in seconds.

The catalog is also the foundation for other platform capabilities. Golden paths register outputs in it. Scorecards evaluate catalog entities. Self-service workflows provision resources linked to catalog entries.

Two Approaches to the Same Problem#

Both Port and Backstage solve the same core problem: giving developers a single interface to discover services, provision infrastructure, and understand the operational state of their systems. They take fundamentally different approaches to getting there.

Backstage is an open-source framework (CNCF Incubating) originally built by Spotify. You deploy and operate it yourself. It provides a plugin architecture and core primitives — you build the portal your organization needs by assembling and configuring plugins.

What an Internal Developer Platform Actually Is#

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is the set of tools, workflows, and self-service capabilities that a platform team builds and maintains so application developers can ship code without filing tickets or waiting on other teams. It is not a single product. It is a curated layer on top of your existing infrastructure that abstracts complexity while preserving the ability to go deeper when needed.