If you read the first article, you know Backstage isn’t just another tool—it’s the IKEA of developer experience (damn, I love this phrasing...), organizing your chaotic infrastructure into something actually usable.
Now, let’s talk about the specific nightmares it fixes, from service sprawl to documentation black holes.
Introduction: Welcome Back to the Chaos
So, you’ve read the first article in this series and now have a solid grasp of what Backstage really is (hint: it’s not just another Jenkins replacement). You’ve hopefully stopped thinking of it as just another tool and started seeing it as the central nervous system for your engineering org.
But let’s take a step back. What problems does Backstage actually solve? And why should you, the platform engineer, invest your time convincing teams to use it?
Today, we’re diving into the pain points every engineering org faces and how Backstage comes in as the cleanup crew.
Problem #1: Service Sprawl – Who Even Owns This Thing?
Remember that time a critical service went down, and nobody knew who was responsible for fixing it? Yeah, that’s service sprawl—where microservices multiply like rabbits, and good luck figuring out who built what.
🔥 Before Backstage:
• Someone built a service two years ago, but the engineer left the company, and now it’s a ghost town.
• Ownership? Unclear. Documentation? Non-existent. Dependency map? Ha, good one.
✅ After Backstage:
• The Service Catalog acts like an internal Yellow Pages for your microservices, making it easy to find who owns what, see dependencies, and track the lifecycle of every service.
• No more Slack messages like “Hey, does anyone know what this API does?”
Problem #2: Onboarding New Engineers – Welcome to the Jungle
New engineers should be writing code, not going on a scavenger hunt for documentation. Yet, somehow, onboarding is still a painful, weeks-long process.
🔥 Before Backstage:
• “Oh, just read the wiki” (which hasn’t been updated since Kubernetes was cool).
• It takes weeks to figure out how to deploy a service because everyone does things differently.
✅ After Backstage:
• Golden Paths ensure every engineer follows the same best-practice templates when spinning up services.
• Onboarding isn’t a tribal knowledge transfer—it’s a structured, repeatable process that doesn’t rely on individual heroics.
Problem #3: Too Many Tools, No Central Hub
Modern engineering teams use dozens of tools. Jira, Jenkins, Datadog, Grafana, Kubernetes dashboards—you name it. But with no central entry point, developers are left jumping between tabs like Olympic athletes.
🔥 Before Backstage:
• Developers waste time context-switching between 10+ dashboards.
• Information is scattered across multiple platforms, with no single place to view project status.
✅ After Backstage:
• Backstage becomes the single pane of glass—a home base where developers can find everything from CI/CD status to Kubernetes deployments, without needing 47 bookmarked links.
Problem #4: Documentation is a Lost Cause
Let’s be honest: engineers don’t love writing documentation. And even when they do, nobody can find it when they actually need it.
🔥 Before Backstage:
• Docs are hidden in Confluence, Google Drive, Notion, and random markdown files in repos.
• Keeping documentation up to date is a mythical concept.
✅ After Backstage:
• TechDocs brings documentation into Backstage, where it lives alongside the services it describes.
• Engineers don’t have to go find docs—docs come to them.
Conclusion: Backstage is a Developer Experience Lifeline
So, there you have it. Backstage doesn’t just make things “nicer”—it eliminates the daily inefficiencies that slow teams down. It makes your organization’s tooling discoverable, consistent, and actually usable.
If you’ve ever wished for a world where:
✅ Engineers onboard faster
✅ Services are actually documented
✅ Developers don’t waste half their day searching for things
…then Backstage might be the best decision your engineering org ever makes.
Up next in this series: How to Convince Your Company to Adopt Backstage (Without Sounding Like a Cult Leader).