While evaluating Service Catalogs tools, it will be likely that you will come across Backstage. But Backstage is **not** a Service Catalog or even a Developer Portal. Open-source and created by Spotify, Backstage calls itself a ***“framework to create your own Internal Developer Portal”***. It has a hyper customization flexibility (coming at the cost of effort), it has a plugin ecosystem (with ~200 integrations) allowing integrations custom to your situation and has a thriving community.
While Backstage is great once implemented, there are couple of common challenges that teams often face getting off-the-ground with it:
1. Built in JS: To setup & use Backstage.io, your team will need to spend time coding in React / Node — as the entire stack is built on it and often a hurdle on why companies decide to not go ahead with Backstage. While any developer should ideally be able to code in any language, there is typically a learning curve and bandwidth that needs to be allocated for that. Many platform & devOps engineers (who often end up owning the Service Catalog & Internal Developer Portal charter) decide to not pick it up because of the same.
2. Additional effort for plugins: While there are some users who appreciate the flexibility, adding every plugin requires additional code effort.
3. Enterprise Functionality Development: Backstage doesn’t provide enterprise functions like SSO and audit logs out of the box. There are some teams that found that it was taking them longer than they planned to develop them and hence, decided to move with an alternate solution.
4. Scorecards: As Backstage.io is a framework, it doesn't offer a scorecards function which could otherwise act as a measure for organizations to drive security standards and operational maturity requirements across teams.
1. Community: Vibrant Open Source project with active contributors and long list of adopters
2. Flexibility: Suitable for companies looking for a flexible framework to build their own internal developer portal. While there is a learning curve initially, some folks end up loving it.
3. Ecosystem: Large pool of ~200 plugins and connectors created by both community & vendors, enabling you to make the catalog rich with automation
(Perfect for making buy/build decisions or internal reviews.)
