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

Install Node.js and Yarn:

npm install -g yarn

Create a new Backstage app:

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

Start Backstage:

yarn dev

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

Step 2: Adding Services to the Software Catalog

Navigate to Create Component in Backstage.
Register an existing GitHub repository.
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

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.

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 }}

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

Set up Backstage locally and explore the UI.
Register a service in the Software Catalog.
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! 🚀

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

👉 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!