Announcing a New CNCF Certification for Backstage
Backstage is an open-source framework for building developer portals, created by Spotify, designed to streamline the process of building software and digital products. Backstage restores order to microservices and unifies infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a better and more efficient developer experience and environment so they can ship high-quality code faster and more autonomously
Backstage was accepted to CNCF on September 8, 2020 and moved to the Incubating maturity level on March 15, 2022. Backstage has more than 3000 adopters and 2000 contributors worldwide, including companies like CVS Health, Siemens, LinkedIn, REI, Vodafone, and Lego, and as of October 2024, Backstage has over 270 public adopters.
“Backstage is the leading open source internal developer portal (IDP) that simplifies development, increases developer efficiency, fosters deeper collaboration, and enhances service visibility, said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “By integrating seamlessly with various tools with a vibrant plug-in ecosystem, Backstage empowers teams to maintain high standards and drive innovation,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF”
Backstage as a Cornerstone of Platform Development
Backstage.io provides a unified and customizable interface that centralizes the management of development tools, services, and documentation within an organization. As a developer portal, it brings together everything developers need in one place, simplifying complex workflows, reducing cognitive load, and accelerating the delivery of high-quality software. Backstage enables platform teams to build a cohesive internal ecosystem, improving productivity, standardization, and governance across projects, making it a cornerstone for organizations seeking to improve productivity, standardization, and governance across projects.
Key features that drive platform development include:
- Centralized Software Catalog: Provides a comprehensive, centralized view of all internal services, libraries, APIs, websites, and other software components, ensuring transparency. This prevents duplication of effort and simplifies tracking ownership and dependencies.
- Standardization service templates: Allows platform teams to define and enforce standardized workflows for creating new microservices or components. These templates allow developers to quickly spin up new services or projects quickly using standardized templates.
- Plugin-based Architecture: Enables teams to extend its functionality by integrating it with CI/CD tools, monitoring systems, cloud environments, Kubernetes clusters, and other DevOps infrastructure.
- Developer Self-Service: Empowers developers with a self-service model, giving them easy access to resources like infrastructure, services, and internal tools, accelerating development cycles and reducing dependencies on platform teams.
- Enhanced DevOps and DevSecOps: Automates standards enforcement with built-in tools for monitoring, security, and compliance that encourages collaboration between teams, making it a critical part of DevOps and DevSecOps workflows.
- Improved Collaboration: Fosters cross-team collaboration by providing transparency and visibility into what other teams are building and how services interconnect, breaking down silos and enhancing coordination.
- TechDoc Generation: Offers built-in support for creating and maintaining technical documentation using markdown files, ensuring that documentation remains up to date and easily accessible, improving overall developer efficiency
Why Developers Prefer Working with Backstage
Developers like Backstage because it streamlines software development by providing a central platform to manage projects, documentation, and tools for building software components in a standardized way, making it an essential tool in DevOps and platform engineering. Designed with developers in mind, Backstage aligns with the growing trend toward customizable, developer-centric environments that integrate seamlessly with various tools and services.
Backstage’s Developer Self-Service functionality improves access to tools, automates routine tasks, and reduces developer reliance on platform teams, accelerating development cycles. Its plugin-based modularity makes it a hub for all the tools developers need to efficiently build, test, and deploy applications, streamlining workflows and improving overall productivity.
“We continue to see more and more companies adopt the Backstage open source framework as their internal developer portal of choice. The framework’s customization, extensibility, and scalability makes Backstage the preferred IDP for organizations of all shapes and sizes, from finance, government, health care, and manufacturing, to scale-ups, startups, and other digital natives. As the ecosystem of Backstage plugins, features, and service providers continues to grow, the demand for Backstage experts also grows. With the CNCF’s Certified Backstage Associate program, companies now have a way to identify and tap into that expertise, while helping to contribute back to the growing Backstage community,” says Pia Nilsson, Head of Platform Developer Experience, Spotify
Backstage Offers Benefits for Multiple Roles in Your Org
Backstage offers value beyond developers, benefiting various roles within an organization. For engineering managers, it helps maintain standards and best practices across teams, making it easier to manage the entire tech ecosystem, from migrations to test certifications. Platform engineers benefit from Backstage’s extensibility and scalability, with the ability to seamlessly integrate new tools and services through plugins, or enhance existing ones. Ultimately, for everyone, Backstage delivers a consistent, unified experience that brings together all infrastructure tooling, resources, standards, ownership, contributors, and administrators in a single, cohesive platform.
Announcing the Certified Backstage Associate (CBA) certification
With all these benefits, knowledge of Backstage is becoming essential to platform development. A certification will validate your expertise in platform engineering, service catalog management, and DevOps integration, making you more competitive for roles like platform engineer, DevOps specialist, or site reliability engineer (SRE).
Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Linux Foundation Education are excited to announce plans to soon launch the Certified Backstage Associate (CBA) certification. Developers, engineers and others interested in the certification can sign up to be notified of the beta and general availability launch here.
The primary domains and competencies covered by this certification are:
- Backstage Development Workflow
- Backstage Infrastructure
- Backstage Catalog
- Customizing Backstage
The CBA certification was built in collaboration with Frontside with the participation of people from Spotify, Rootly, Roadie, Red Hat, Adaptavist, Anuclei, Agile Lab, Adyen, IBM, Cognizant, SAS, Roboautal Pte Ltd, John Deere and Airbus.