What the Heck is Backstage Anyway?

This post announces the open-sourcing of Backstage, Spotify's homegrown developer portal. It explains the problem of infrastructure fragmentation in growing companies and positions Backstage as a unified UI layer for all infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation. The post details four key use cases at Spotify: creating new microservices with templated best practices, following pull requests from review to production via CI integration, centralizing technical documentation using a docs-as-code approach with MkDocs, and reviewing mobile feature performance. It also outlines the vision for Backstage OSS through three phases: an extensible frontend platform, managing software inventory, and building an ecosystem of plugins.