Internal Developer
Platform with Backstage
Built a production-grade IDP that eliminated manual onboarding, gave developers self-service superpowers, and made the platform team invisible in the best possible way.
What We Built & Why
The Problem We Solved
Before the IDP, every new service meant a Slack message to the platform team, a 2-day wait for environment setup, and tribal knowledge scattered across wikis. Developers were blocked. Platform engineers were overwhelmed.
We chose Backstage — Spotify's open-source IDP framework — because it gave us a plugin ecosystem, a service catalog model, and a scaffolder engine that matched exactly what we needed.
The result: developers self-serve everything from service creation to environment provisioning. The platform team shifted from reactive ticket-closers to proactive platform builders.
Platform Capabilities
Service Catalog
Centralized registry of all microservices, APIs, libraries, and infrastructure components with ownership metadata.
Golden Path Templates
Opinionated scaffolding templates that let devs spin up new services with best practices baked in — one click.
Self-Service Workflows
Developers provision environments, request access, and deploy services without waiting on platform team.
GitHub Integration
Auto-discovers repos, syncs ownership, and surfaces CI/CD status directly in the catalog.
TechDocs
Docs-as-code: Markdown documentation lives alongside code, rendered beautifully inside Backstage.
RBAC & Permissions
Fine-grained access control — teams own their services, platform team controls the platform.
How It's Wired
Build Timeline
Mapped existing service landscape, identified pain points in onboarding, designed catalog schema and plugin architecture.
Deployed Backstage on Kubernetes with Helm, configured PostgreSQL backend, set up GitHub OAuth and org integration.
Wrote automation scripts to auto-register 40+ services from GitHub repos using catalog-info.yaml discovery.
Built scaffolder templates for Node.js microservices, Python APIs, and Terraform modules with CI/CD pre-wired.
Ran internal workshops, created TechDocs, achieved 80%+ developer adoption within 6 weeks of launch.