Backstage Moves Into the CNCF Sandbox

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted Spotify's Backstage, an open source developer portal, as a Sandbox project. The move marks an early-stage milestone for a project Spotify describes as one of its most ambitious open source efforts to date. The CNCF is already home to widely adopted infrastructure projects including Kubernetes and Envoy.

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals, organized around a centralized service catalog. It was originally built for Spotify's internal engineering teams and open sourced in March 2020. The platform is designed to manage and streamline development environments end to end, covering everything from service discovery to documentation to software scaffolding.

What the Platform Addresses

Spotify positions Backstage as a solution to several common pain points in large engineering organizations:

  • Service catalog and discoverability. For teams wrestling with fragmented infrastructure and orphaned dependencies, the Backstage Service Catalog provides a centralized system for tracking software across the organization. Spotify says the catalog helps teams manage a handful of services and scales to support companies managing thousands.

  • Software templates. Backstage Software Templates automate project bootstrapping. Engineers pick a template and Backstage sets up the repository, kicks off the first build, and provisions a Hello World project with organizational best practices pre-configured. The goal is to reduce low-variance decision-making during setup so developers can focus on higher-level problems.

  • Documentation built like code. Backstage’s TechDocs feature treats technical documentation as source code. Engineers write Markdown docs alongside their code, and a TechDocs site is automatically provisioned in the same repository for each new project. Updates to docs and code can ship in the same pull request.

  • Plugin architecture. Backstage is designed to integrate with existing infrastructure through plugins. Organizations can build internal plugins for proprietary tooling or contribute open source plugins to a growing marketplace that functions like an app store for developer infrastructure.

Community Momentum

Spotify says more than 130 people have contributed to Backstage, with roughly 40 percent of pull requests coming from outside the company. The project was released as open source early by design, according to Principal Product Manager Stefan Ålund, with the intention of letting external input shape the product as it matured into the version now entering the CNCF Sandbox.

Interest in Backstage has come from a range of industries beyond tech, including airlines, automotive manufacturers, investment firms, and retailers, all dealing with similar infrastructure complexity. Spotify argues that opening up development of the tool to a wider set of engineering organizations produces a better product that serves use cases beyond its own.

Spotify’s Head of the Open Source Program Office, Remy DeCausemaker, framed the CNCF acceptance as a significant step for the company's broader open source strategy. Backstage is the first Spotify project dedicated to an upstream foundation, and the company sees it as a learning opportunity for future releases.