From Day 0 to Day 2 - a Guide to Planning and Implementing Backstage

Backstage’s biggest strength is its flexibility. It’s an open and highly extensible platform, designed to be flexible enough to adapt to the way your engineering team works. With the right setup, it can become the backbone of your internal developer portal, streamlining service discovery, documentation, self-service workflows and software standards governance.

But that same flexibility comes with a cost. Backstage doesn’t come pre-configured for your organization’s needs - it’s a toolkit; more a framework for building an internal developer platform than a platform in and of itself. Moreover, it requires customization and ongoing maintenance, and crucially, it demands TypeScript expertise - a skillset that many platform teams don’t typically have in-house. Unlike infrastructure-as-code or cloud automation tools (which use more familiar Python or Go), Backstage development requires working directly with a React and TypeScript codebase. This mismatch in skillsets is one of the biggest hurdles teams face when trying to operationalize Backstage, and it’s a key reason why many underestimate the effort required - especially beyond the initial deployment.

It’s helpful to think of the Backstage journey following a lifecycle: the planning and setup phase (Day 0), the deployment and integration work (Day 1), and the ongoing operations, scaling, and optimization (Day 2 and beyond). Each of these phases comes with its own challenges, and if you’re not thinking ahead, it’s easy to get stuck and see momentum stall.

Day 0: Planning and Strategy - Laying the Foundation for Backstage

Before diving headfirst into writing YAML, it makes sense to ensure Backstage is set up to solve real problems for your engineering teams. Many organizations install Backstage expecting quick wins, only to find that a half-filled service catalog and a couple of integrations deliver little immediate value. A successful implementation starts with understanding what engineers actually need from Backstage - whether it’s faster onboarding, better service discoverability, or standardization across teams. Without this clarity, adoption stalls before it even begins.

Key considerations for Day 0

Defining success. What problem are you solving? Service observability? Developer self-service? Compliance automation? What’s the burning problem that you’re hoping an IDP will solve? Speak to your broader engineering organization and find out if the major source of frustration is a lack of centralized information around services, painful and lengthy environment creation times, or a lack of engineering standards. Knowing what problem you’re solving helps prioritize your Backstage implementation and rollout.

Building organization alignment. One of the most underestimated challenges isn’t technical at all - it’s cultural. Backstage success relies on organizational buy-in, and many teams struggle with adoption of the developer portal concept itself. Engineers may be skeptical about whether Backstage (or any portal) will truly save them time or improve their workflows. A strong internal advocacy plan is just as important as a technical implementation plan. As such, it’s important to consider who owns the portal? What teams need to be involved? How will you drive adoption? Successful Backstage implementations have a clear owner who can lead this - whether that’s the platform team, developer experience group, or an infrastructure lead.

Understanding complexity. Are you dealing with multiple repositories? Do you have existing metadata in spreadsheets? What integrations do you need from day one? Backstage thrives in complex engineering environments, but that complexity also makes implementation harder. If your services are spread across multiple repos (because you’re in the process of changing SCMs, for example), you’ll need to define a strategy for catalog completeness. Similarly, if engineering teams have historically tracked metadata in spreadsheets or Confluence, plan for how that information will migrate into Backstage.

Choosing a hosting model. Do you have the bandwidth to stand up and then maintain a self-hosted Backstage instance, or would a managed solution free up your team? Self-hosting Backstage means setting up your own infrastructure, handling upgrades, and troubleshooting outages - responsibilities that many platform teams don’t want to take on. A managed solution like Roadie allows you to focus on adoption and feature development instead of infrastructure headaches.

How Roadie helps on Day 0

• Expert-led onboarding. We guide teams through best practices and pitfalls based on real-world experience with different customers across multiple verticals.
• Pre-built integrations. Get out-of-the-box support for GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, and more without spending months setting up plugins.
• No infrastructure headaches. Roadie fully manages Backstage, so you don’t need to worry about performance, upgrades, security patches, or downtime.

Many teams get stuck in Day 0, unsure of where to begin. With Roadie, you don’t have to navigate this alone. Our Solutions team has helped hundreds of organizations set up Backstage Proof of Concepts, and helps ensure a good fit for Backstage and your organization from the very beginning.

Day 1: Deployment and Integration - Getting Backstage Live

Once the strategy is in place, it’s time to make Backstage a reality. This phase involves setting up the initial Backstage implementation, including the software catalog, integrating with existing developer tools, and ensuring that authentication, access control, and self-service workflows are functional.

Key considerations for Day 1

Service catalog population. Where will Backstage source its metadata? Do you need GitHub sync, YAML definitions, or both? A common mistake is launching Backstage with an incomplete catalog, which can hamper efforts at driving adoption. If engineers search for a service and can’t find it, they won’t come back. You need a strategy for automatic catalog population so that new services appear without manual effort. Putting Backstage into the production path is also a good way to ensure long-term catalog completeness - if developers are required to register their new services in Backstage, it builds a positive feedback loop to drive catalog completion.

Tooling integrations. Which services (CI/CD, observability, cloud platforms) should be connected? Backstage is most powerful when it integrates with the tools developers use daily. Are you pulling in logs from Datadog? Linking to on-call rotations in PagerDuty? Surfacing deployment insights from ArgoCD? The sooner Backstage provides visibility into a team’s actual workflow, the sooner it becomes indispensable. One of Backstage’s most compelling propositions is of the central pane of glass, reducing the need for developers to switch windows. This is only possible if you’ve integrated all the necessary tools into your Backstage environment.

Authentication and RBAC. How do you ensure secure, role-based access control? Not every engineer needs full edit access to Backstage and all of its various moving parts. Define your authentication strategy early - will you use GitHub SSO? Okta? A custom identity provider? Role-based access control (RBAC) should align with your engineering org’s structure so that only relevant teams can modify services and templates while ensuring visibility remains open. Fine grain control allows you to go deeper, restricting access to sensitive entities or applying sensible limits on who can (for instance) create new scaffolder actions.

Scaffolder workflows. Speaking of which, what self-service templates will accelerate developer productivity? The scaffolder is often underutilized because teams don’t set up useful templates from the start. Think about what engineers repeatedly request from platform teams (or check your ticket volumes) - service creation, infrastructure provisioning, spinning up a new API - and build those workflows into Backstage’s scaffolder. The goal is to reduce developer toil by automating common tasks**.**

How Roadie helps on Day 1

• Instant deployment. A fully managed Backstage instance, set up in minutes instead of months.
• Automated catalog population. GitHub sync, YAML registration and the Roadie catalog API streamline the onboarding process.
• Pre-configured RBAC. Secure access controls without needing to build policies from scratch. Fine-grained control gets you the granularity you need on top of sensible defaults.
• Scaffolder templates and best practice. We can help get you going with advice and guidance on workflows for service creation, infrastructure provisioning, and more.

By handling the operational complexity, Roadie ensures that Day 1 is about getting value from Backstage, not wrestling with configuration files.

Day 2: Operations and Optimization - Keeping Backstage Running Smoothly

Great, you’ve got Backstage live, but now the real work begins! More than anything, for teams approaching Day 2, adoption becomes the focus, but there’s still a significant governance and performance management component. Without a strong Day 2 plan, Backstage can quickly become outdated, underutilized, or a maintenance burden.

Key considerations for Day 2

Monitoring and performance. Is Backstage responsive, scalable, and available when developers need it? Engineers are notoriously performance sensitive, so Backstage should feel snappy, not sluggish. A slow portal can affect adoption - monitoring page load speeds, request latency, database queries, and plugin performance ensures that Backstage remains fast and scalable as more teams onboard, and the size of the catalog grows.

Governance and compliance. Are service owners keeping metadata up to date? Is technical debt being tracked? Backstage is only as useful as the data inside it. If ownership details, API versions, or compliance statuses are outdated, trust erodes. Setting up Tech Insights to track stale metadata and enforce policies helps maintain catalog health.

Driving adoption. Are developers using Backstage as their central hub? How do you encourage engagement? A Backstage rollout is only successful if engineers actually use it. This means marketing it internally, gathering feedback, and ensuring that the portal delivers real value - whether that’s through dashboards, integrations, or self-service features.

Ongoing feature development. What additional capabilities and custom plugins should you roll out over time? Backstage evolves. As teams become comfortable with the service catalog, they may want to expand into TechDocs, scorecards, security insights or even custom plugins specific to their needs. Having a roadmap for feature adoption keeps momentum going.

How Roadie helps on Day 2

• Automated upgrades and maintenance. Always running the latest, most secure version - no manual updates required.
• Tech Insights for governance. We help you identify gaps in ownership, enforce security policies, and track catalog health.
• Performance and scaling support. Roadie continuously optimizes for speed and reliability, even as usage grows.
• Ongoing guidance and best practice. Access to our team of solution engineers and customer success for troubleshooting, strategy, and long-term platform growth and adoption.

Maintaining Backstage isn’t just about keeping it running - it’s about keeping it useful. Many teams struggle with the high maintenance effort and slow feature development velocity, as each upgrade or new integration requires engineering time. With Roadie, we handle upgrades, performance optimization, and feature rollouts for you, ensuring your Backstage instance stays modern without burdening your team.

A Simpler, Faster Path to Backstage Success

Backstage adoption isn’t just about getting to Day 2 - it’s about ensuring long-term success through proper planning, a smooth launch, and continuous improvement.

Without Roadie, teams often find themselves bogged down in maintenance, debugging, and internal support. With Roadie, Backstage is effortless to deploy, easy to scale, and always up-to-date. That’s why to date, we’ve had several customers migrate from self-hosted Backstage to a Roadie-managed solution.

If you’re considering Backstage or struggling with an existing implementation, let’s talk. Book a demo today and see how Roadie accelerates your journey from Day 0 to Day 2 and beyond.