Skip to content

SYSTEM Cited by 1 source

Backstage

Definition

Backstage is an open-source platform for building developer portals, originally created at Spotify and donated to the CNCF. Backstage provides a pluggable UI shell and a software-catalog model so that internal infrastructure teams can unify their services, docs, CI/CD status, dashboards, and operational tooling into a single web UI per engineering organisation.

Stub page. Most of Backstage's internals (the Software Catalog, the plugin model, TechDocs) are out of scope here — expand when deeper sources arrive.

Role on this wiki

Backstage is currently cited as the substrate for internal ML pipeline portals. Canonical instance:

  • Zalando ML Portal (2022-04-18) — Zalando's ML Platform team built an ML-pipeline observability surface on top of Backstage. It exposes pipeline-execution state, per-run metrics graphed across training runs, and model cards. Per the post: "Pipeline tracking is a part of the internal Zalando developer portal running on top of Backstage, an open-source platform for building such portals."

This is the first wiki reference for Backstage and the first for the developer- portal-as-ML-control-plane pattern it enables.

Why Backstage for ML pipelines

The implicit design move: Backstage is already the general internal developer portal, so ML pipeline observability lives in the same surface engineers already use for service catalogs, runbooks, and docs — rather than being a standalone ML-only UI. This is a pragmatic case of reusing existing infrastructure over building a purpose-built service.

Seen in

Last updated · 501 distilled / 1,218 read