Platform engineering emerged to reduce cognitive load on developers by providing self-service capabilities and golden paths.

Step 1 — The Shift from DevOps to Platform Engineering

While DevOps is a culture of collaboration, Platform Engineering provides the concrete tools (Internal Developer Platforms) that enforce this culture at scale.

Step 2 — Building with Backstage

Spotify's Backstage is the leading framework for building IDPs. It centralizes software catalogs, documentation, and scaffolders.

Terminalbash
# Create a Backstage app
npx @backstage/create-app
cd my-backstage-app
yarn dev

Core IDP Components

  • Software Catalog: Central registry of microservices.
  • Scaffolder: Templates for creating new services with best practices built-in.
  • TechDocs: Docs-like-code living next to the source.