The developers in your organisation are reinventing the technical wheel every day. Besides coding, they need to handle cross-cutting issues like ops, compliance and security. This takes time, results in a large technical footprint, and inevitably many of the solutions don’t match the best practices you would hope for.

We use Backstage, an open-source platform created by Spotify, to help solve these problems. Instead of restricting autonomy and mandating solutions, you provide easy-to-use templates which lead developers down a “golden path” of best practices with very little effort. It also offers a web interface in which all services, libraries and tools in the organisation can be found, along with their documentation as code.

In this talk I’ll introduce Backstage with live coding. I’ll show you how we use it to get a hello-world project deployed to production in minutes. I’ll demonstrate the primary benefits, the drawbacks, and the alternatives. You’ll leave the talk with a good idea of whether Backstage could help you, and if so, how you can convince your company to use it.