Day 22: Building Templates and Catalogs with Backstage

Welcome to Day 22 of the Zero to Platform Engineer in 30 Days challenge! 🚀 Today, we’re diving into Backstage, the leading Internal Developer Platform (IDP) tool, to build service templates and a software catalog for streamlined developer workflows.

Why Use Backstage for Service Templates and Catalogs?

Backstage, originally developed by Spotify, helps platform teams:

• Standardize service creation with templates.
• Provide a single source of truth for all microservices.
• Improve developer self-service capabilities.
• Reduce onboarding time by automating infrastructure setup.

📌 Companies like Spotify, American Airlines, and Expedia use Backstage to improve DevEx.

🎯 Key Features of Backstage:

• Software Catalog → Organizes services, APIs, and dependencies.
• Service Templates → Automates project scaffolding and best practices.
• Plugins & Extensibility → Integrates with Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, etc.

💡 Backstage simplifies service discovery and deployment for engineering teams!

Hands-On: Setting Up Backstage

Step 1: Install Backstage Locally

1. Install Node.js and Yarn:

npm install -g yarn

2. Create a new Backstage app:

npx @backstage/create-app@latest
cd my-backstage-app

3. Start Backstage:

yarn dev

4. Open Backstage in your browser: http://localhost:3000

Step 2: Adding Services to the Software Catalog

1. Navigate to Create Component in Backstage.
2. Register an existing GitHub repository.
3. Define catalog-info.yaml in the repo:

apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: zero-to-platform
  annotations:
    github.com/project-slug: parraletz/zero-to-platform-engineer
spec:
  type: service
  owner: engineering
  lifecycle: production

4. Push changes and Backstage will automatically detect the service.

Step 3: Creating a Service Template

Service templates allow teams to quickly scaffold new projects with best practices.

1. Create a template.yaml file:

apiVersion: scaffolder.backstage.io/v1beta3
kind: Template
metadata:
  name: nodejs-service
  title: Node.js Service Template
  description: Scaffolds a Node.js microservice
spec:
  owner: platform-team
  type: service
  steps:
    - action: fetch:template
      input:
        url: ./skeleton
        values:
          name: ${{ parameters.name }}
  output:
    serviceUrl: https://github.com/parraletz/${{ parameters.name }}

2. Define the skeleton project inside the skeleton directory:

mkdir skeleton
cd skeleton

# Create a package.json file
npm init -y

3.Add the template to Backstage.

📌 Now, developers can create standardized services in a few clicks!

How Templates Improve Developer Experience (DevEx)

**Before Templates:

• Developers manually set up services.
• Different projects have inconsistent configurations.
• Onboarding a new developer takes days.

With Backstage Templates:

• Developers can spin up new services instantly.
• Enforces best practices across all projects.
• Onboarding takes minutes instead of day

Activity for Today

1. Set up Backstage locally and explore the UI.
2. Register a service in the Software Catalog.
3. Create a Service Template for a microservice.

What’s Next?

Tomorrow, we’ll cover secrets management using AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault.

👉 Check it out here: Zero to Platform Engineer Repository

Feel free to clone the repo, experiment with the code, and even contribute if you’d like! 🚀

Follow the Series!

🎉 Don’t miss a single step in your journey to becoming a Platform Engineer! 🎉

This post is just the beginning. Here’s what we’ve covered so far and what’s coming up next:

• Day 0: Introduction - What’s Platform Engineering?

• Day 1: Introduction to the CNCF Landscape

• Day 2: Day 2: Containers and Docker - The Building Blocks of Cloud Native

• Day 3: Containers and Kubernetes - The Building Blocks of Cloud Native

• Day 4: Deployments and Scaling in Kubernetes - Let’s Get Practical

• Day 5: Kubernetes Services – Connecting Your Applications

• Day 6: ConfigMaps and Secrets – Managing Configurations in Kubernetes

• Day 7: Recap and Hands-On Challenges for Week 1

• Day 8: Introduction to Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Day 9: Advanced Terraform – Managing Kubernetes Resources

• Day 10: Managing Kubernetes with Helm and Terraform

• Day 11: Introduction to GitOps with ArgoCD

• Day 12: Advanced GitOps with Argo Rollouts

👉 Bookmark this blog and check back every day for new posts in the series. 📣 Share your progress on social media with the hashtag #ZeroToPlatformEngineer to connect with other readers!