--- id: background title: The Spotify Story description: Backstage was born out of necessity at Spotify. We found that as we grew, our infrastructure was becoming more fragmented, our engineers less productive. --- Backstage was born out of necessity at Spotify. We found that as we grew, our infrastructure was becoming more fragmented, our engineers less productive. Instead of building and testing code, teams were spending more time looking for the right information just to get started. “Where’s the API for that service we’re all supposed to be using?” “What version of that framework is everyone on?” “This service isn’t responding, who owns it?” “I can’t find documentation for anything!” Context switching and cognitive overload were dragging engineers down, day by day. We needed to make it easier for our engineers to do their work without having to become an expert in every aspect of infrastructure tooling. Our idea was to centralize and simplify end-to-end software development with an abstraction layer that sits on top of all of our infrastructure and developer tooling. That’s Backstage. It’s a developer portal powered by a centralized software catalog — with a plugin architecture that makes it endlessly extensible and customizable. Manage all your services, software, tooling, and testing in Backstage. Start building a new microservice using an automated template in Backstage. Create, maintain, and find the documentation for all that software in Backstage. One place for everything. Accessible to everyone. Backstage was originally built by Spotify and then donated to the CNCF. Backstage is currently in the Incubation phase. Read the announcement [here](https://backstage.io/blog/2022/03/16/backstage-turns-two#out-of-the-sandbox-and-into-incubation). CNCF logo