Explore Backstage architecture, plugins, and the software catalog. Compare self-hosted Backstage, proprietary portals, and SaaS portals built on open standards.

Learn how Backstage and a service catalog tame microservices sprawl, clarify ownership, reduce MTTR, and accelerate onboarding with Golden Paths and dependency visibility.

Learn how to dynamically manage catalog data sources in Backstage without redeploying. This post introduces a provider pooling pattern that pre-registers EntityProviders at startup and assigns them to consumers at runtime—enabling multi-tenancy, user-defined integrations, and self-service onboarding scenarios.

A build vs. buy analysis of self-hosting Backstage—real costs, hidden tradeoffs, and what engineering leaders should consider before committing platform time.

Platform engineering is entering its maturity phase. As IDPs and best practices standardize, building your own platform interface is becoming a costly distraction. We explore why DIY platform engineering is dead—and what winning teams do instead.

Choosing a developer portal is a multi-year, multi-million dollar decision. This guide compares the 7 best enterprise IDPs, breaking down cost, maintenance, lock-in, and scalability.

Backstage promises a low-cost, open-source solution for building an Internal Developer Portal, but the true true cost of ownership can be surprisingly high. We explore how hidden costs like setup, customization, and ongoing maintenance often make Backstage more complex and costly than you may think...

Backstage isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay - for some software engineering teams Backstage may just not be a good fit. From small teams that thrive on shared knowledge and simplicity, to organizations with clean, modern tech stacks that don’t face legacy complexity, we break down where Backstage might not shine. Plus, we highlight Backstage alternatives that can meet your needs until size, scale or complexity demand a more robust solution.

Backstage is powerful, but getting it right takes work. We break down the Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 journey of implementing Backstage, covering the planning, deployment, and long-term maintenance challenges that teams face. From the hidden complexities of catalog population to the skill gaps in platform teams, we explore what it really takes to make Backstage successful.

Wiz helps engineering teams stay on top of security risks, but flipping between tools to check vulnerabilities slows everything down. With the new Wiz Plugin for Backstage, teams can see their security insights right alongside their services, documentation, and pipelines - no extra steps required!

Backstage is powerful, but like any application, keeping it stable at scale can be a challenge. Memory leaks, unnecessary restarts, and background jobs interfering with performance can slowly erode reliability - until they become major headaches. At Roadie, we’ve been making deep, structural improvements to eliminate these issues, ensuring a smoother, more resilient experience for platform teams. Here’s how the Roadie engineering team tackled hidden performance pitfalls and made Backstage run better than ever.

Deploying Backstage is just the beginning. The real challenge is turning it into a tool your developers rely on. Successful adoption requires treating Backstage like a product, aligning it with workflows, and fostering collaboration. Discover how to sustain adoption through strategic planning, automation, and creating meaningful value for your teams.

Deploying Backstage is just the beginning. The real challenge is turning it into a tool your developers rely on. Successful adoption requires treating Backstage like a product, aligning it with workflows, and fostering collaboration. Discover how to sustain adoption through strategic planning, automation, and creating meaningful value for your teams.

Thinking about implementing an IDP? Here’s what we think you should be thinking about. From tackling discoverability issues and enabling self-service environments, to streamlining the developer experience and leveraging insights, we explore how to think about the things that actually matter when you're planning out your IDP implementation.

Roadie is now available on AWS Marketplace, making it easier than ever before to start your Backstage journey.

Curious about the Backstage Scaffolder? We take a look at what you can do with this powerful tool as well as some of its limitations in comparison to its rivals.

BackstageCon & KubeCon North America 2024 was a riot, but what happened? What did we learn? And which sessions should you catchup on via the CNCF YouTube channel?

How does the Backstage System Model actually work? How can you use it to create a structured, flexible Catalog? How do you make sure you can both model how your organisation thinks and speaks, without locking yourself into the same model forever?

Discover why the hybrid model for Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) offers the best of both worlds. We explore the pros and cons of open-source, proprietary, and hybrid IDPs, ultimately revealing how hybrid solutions like Roadie combine the extensibility and community support of open-source with the ease of use and quick deployment of proprietary options.

Part of the Backstage Adoption series, this post lays out two broad categories of proven initiatives and tactics that can be used to drive adoption of Backstage in your organisation.

Tracking and measuring developer experience is crucial for driving efficiency and productivity as your organization grows. We explore two effective approaches to aggregating DX metrics, either through third-party tools or natively within Backstage using Tech Insights, helping you make informed decisions to optimize your development workflows.

Thinking about upgrading to Backstage’s new backend system? Check out our comprehensive guide that walks you through a minimal-disruption migration. Learn how to prepare your environment, use the legacy plugin bridge for existing plugins, and smoothly transition to the modern architecture. We'll help you navigate this migration so you can unlock improved scalability, efficiency, and set the stage for future development.

Every engineering organization is unique, and your Internal Developer Portal should reflect that. Roadie builds on Backstage’s flexibility, and makes it much easier for teams to customize their developer portal to match their tools, culture, and workflows. From theming and UI tweaks, to custom data models, entity providers, and plugins, learn how Roadie combines ease-of-use with extensive customization.

As cloud costs grow, organizations are finding that empowering engineers to take ownership of cloud spend and to optimize it as part of the development process leads to more efficient resource usage. We investigate the growing phenomenon of shifting cost awareness left and how it helps teams take ownership of cloud spend and make proactive decisions to optimize efficiency and delivery.

Backstage a smoother experience for your team and boost adoption by creating effective internal getting started documentation and support channels.

Engineering standards ensure consistency, reliability, and quality across projects and teams. Defining these standards can be tricky, but that is only half the battle. To make them effective standards must be adhered to. They need to be broken down into bitesized, actionable chunks.

How to make adding relationships between entities easier for everyone in the Backstage catalog.

Unlock the full potential of Backstage with our guide to optimizing its Catalog performance. Whether you're building a custom internal developer portal or scaling your Backstage deployment, this article provides the crucial insights you need to avoid common performance pitfalls.

How to make updating entities in your Backstage catalog painless and quick, and unlock large scale scripted updates via API.

Exploring some of the categorisation issues organisations may come up against when trying to add new entities to the Backstage catalog, and possible solutions.

The Backstage developer portal is an excellent tool for platform teams, as well as engineers, to keep a handle on their software, maintain compliance statuses and spin up new services. Unfortunately the open source Backstage is known for its difficult set up time and overall cumbersome maintainability. There are multiple challenges that arise when the volume of data in the Backstage grows to 1,000s and 10,000s of entities, ranging from performance to ease of use.

As organizations strive to innovate and deploy new features rapidly, they often encounter a significant hurdle known as the "Day 2 problem." This term refers to the challenges that arise after the initial deployment of software, including maintenance, scalability, and observability. Roadie, leveraging the power of Backstage, is here to address these issues head-on.