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.

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: