Backstage Marks One Year in Open Source

Backstage, Spotify's internal developer portal turned open source project, is celebrating its first anniversary. What began as a Hack Week proof of concept in March 2020 is now a CNCF Sandbox project alongside Kubernetes, Envoy, and Helm. In that first year, the project accumulated thousands of pull requests and attracted a roster of adopters including Expedia, Zalando, TELUS, American Airlines, and DoorDash.

Spotify's own history with Backstage goes back further than the public release. A primitive version was in use by developers four years prior to the open source debut, during a period of rapid company growth. As the number of engineers, software components, and tools expanded, so did the friction of managing infrastructure without a central system. There was no single way to create a microservice—there were a dozen; no single path for new developers to navigate the stack—there were hundreds.

From Internal Tool to Standard Platform

Backstage began as a service catalog and organically grew into a hub for all of Spotify's development work. Engineering teams adopted it to streamline workflows, align with cross-organization efforts, and reduce daily friction. It became the single pane of glass for tooling—managing data pipelines, software migrations, and everyday development tasks. With infrastructure tooling out of the way, developers could build and test faster, and onboarding new engineers became simpler thanks to improved discovery of ownership, documentation, and best practices.

The key distinction between Spotify's internal Backstage and what was released to the public is intent. Instead of shipping Spotify's developer portal, the team shipped a platform for others to build their own. The first open source release was largely an empty shell. Since then, feedback from early adopters and community contributions have shaped it into a more complete product.

Over the past year, the project introduced several core features:

  • Service Catalog, Software Templates, TechDocs, and a Kubernetes monitoring tool: Functionality the project considers core to the Backstage experience.
  • Plugin Marketplace: A growing ecosystem of open source plugins, including contributions from individuals, tech companies, and providers like Snyk.
  • Backstage Design System: Tools and guidelines to ensure consistent frontend design, usable even by non-designers.

Stabilizing Core Features

Having iterated on core features throughout the year, the project is now shifting focus to stability. The aim is to make Backstage ready for wider production adoption. The Service Catalog and Software Templates scaffolder are both being moved into beta, and an API stability index has been introduced to prepare for a more stable release.

Upcoming work includes creating a standardized path for building plugins, improving search capabilities, and incorporating GraphQL systemwide. Further details are outlined in the project's public roadmap.

Adoption Across Industries

Spotify's rule of thumb: once an organization reaches around 100 engineers, managing infrastructure with spreadsheets and Slack channels is no longer sufficient. Backstage has been positioned as the answer to that problem.

  • Expedia has dedicated a team to rolling out Backstage.
  • American Airlines has 20 teams using its version, called Runway, and reports over 500 daily hits on internal tools—up from roughly 50 per day a few months prior.
  • DoorDash, one of the newer adopters, stood up its initial environment with support from the Spotify team and community.
  • Zalando and SDA SE shared their adoption experiences at the project's first community session.

The community behind the project has grown steadily, averaging two new contributors per week since launch. An official Backstage Community page now serves as a home for maintainers, contributors, and adopters to coordinate efforts.