Backstage is an open-source product developed and leveraged by Spotify that helps dev teams manage their services, software, tooling, etc., all in a centralized place.
It was developed to improve team productivity working with complex infrastructure. So, as opposed to investing time looking for information like, "Where's the API for that service we're all supposed to be using?" "What version of that framework is everyone on?" "This service isn't responding. Who owns it?" "I can't find documentation for anything!" engineers can quickly look for information about the infrastructure at a centralized place via Backstage.
Every team can see all the services they own and related resources (deployments, data pipelines, pull request status, libraries, frameworks, ML models, all the dependencies etc.)
The platform offers a consistent experience acting as a frontend for our infrastructure that ties all our infrastructure tooling, resources, standards, owners, contributors, and administrators together in one place.
A couple of ways Spotify leverages the product:
With Backstage, teams at Spotify define standard templates for their services, which enables them create new services with a few clicks adhering to the best practices that existing services follow.
After inputting metadata about the service, a new repository is created with a "hello world" service that automatically builds and deploys in production on Kubernetes. With the ownership of the service provided in the metadata, organization-wide teams can view on the dashboard the owners of the spawned service.
Spotify mobile app is developed by many different teams and the codebase is divided up into different features, each owned and maintained by a separate team. If an app developer on one team wants to understand how their feature affects overall app performance, including a look at crashes, releases, test coverage over time and more information, they do it via Backstage.
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For more information, check out this resource.
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