Backstage is a "Stepping Stone" to Modern Developer Platforms
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Backstage was Transformative... But the Industry is Changing
August 28, 2025
Backstage has been a staple of the "internal developer portal" market for the past few years. It honestly took the IT world by storm. At one point in 2024, every single one of my customers at a large SI was exploring implementing Backstage to provide developer self-service and create a service catalog.
Any why shouldn't it — Backstage is free.
At this point, I've implemented Backstage for many companies. I got to see first-hand exactly how much effort went into setting up the infrastructure and platform itself. I got to see how much time it took to implement the service catalog (plus maintain it!). Unfortunately, I also got to see how many Backstage implementations turned into glorified portals to expose data stored in Confluence.
Here are the key challenges that enterprises struggle with when implementing Backstage
The cost to run your own instance is surprisingly high - most of my customers dedicated 3-5 FTEs between Platform, SRE, DevOps, and SWE to keep Backstage up and running for environments that served 1,000 developers and IT staff. This costs anywhere from $300k - $1.5m annually.
- IT teams must allocate, maintain, and secure virtual infrastructure
- Platform teams must ensure Backstage remains healthy and accessible
- SRE teams must configure logging, monitoring, and alerting
- DevOps teams must develop, configure, and maintain automations to keep the platform healthy
- Software Engineering teams must develop and maintain custom integrations
Maintaining up-to-date service catalogs is time-consuming — most of my customers spent a lot of time creating their initial service catalog and did a great job with it. However, maintaining the service catalog is a manual process which leads to unexpected costs. Here's what my customers typically did:
- Dedicate a team to keep the service catalog up-to-date
- Ask their developers to spend a few hours per week to keep the service catalog up-to-date
- Let the service catalog become stale
Developers "getting things done" remained elusive — service catalogs and self-service workflows provide powerful tools for agile organizations with small teams of highly-skilled engineers. However, after deploying Backstage, medium/large organizations struggled with the following:
- Ensuring that "golden path" workflows remain secure, up-to-date, and compliant is a constant challenge
- Providing multiple variants of workflows to meet unique needs of teams added engineering complexity
- Developers still leave Backstage to do things for their day-to-day
- The majority of Backstage instances became read-only data stores aggregating information from external systems
Solving the Challenges with Modern Developer Platforms
Backstage allowed organizations to understand what a "single pane of glass" truly means when it comes to empowering developers. However, with advancements in technology and the rise of Generative AI, organizations should look to the future to better serve their developers and improve efficiency.
The cost to run your own instance is surprisingly high --> large organizations benefit financially from leveraging developer platforms using a SaaS model. If you want to run your own Backstage and provide tangible benefits to your users, expect a dedicated team of 5-10 FTEs to deploy/maintain the platform, build/maintain the automations, and create new integrations.
Maintaining up-to-date service catalogs is time-consuming --> in the era of AI, there is no excuse to use an IDP that requires manual updates to keep your service catalog up-to-date. CodeCargo is directly integrated to your SCM and uses declarative code, GenAI, and Machine Learning to automatically keep your service catalog up-to-date with every single code commit and deployment. There is no reason to ask your developers to spend 30 minutes each day maintaining your service catalog when well-designed code can do the same thing, automatically, at-scale.
Developers "getting things done" remained elusive --> Backstage is a portal to build portals, batteries not-included. If you want to actually "do something," all of the compute is offloaded to external platforms via integrations. Either your ISV provides the integrations, or you build (and maintain) them yourself. CodeCargo ships with a built-in automation engine that can execute your GitHub Actions Workflows or GenAI prompts at scale. This means you can perform a bulk migration from Jenkins to GitHub Actions Workflows across thousands of repositories while applying corporate compliance rules and create the necessary PRs from a single user interface. Batteries included.
C
CodeCargo Team
The CodeCargo team writes about GitHub workflow automation, developer productivity, and DevOps best practices.
