What it really takes to build an Internal Developer Platform with Backstage

Backstage gives you a beautiful developer portal. But a portal is not a platform.

Behind every internal developer platform sits a long list of decisions and integrations. CI/CD. Observability. Environment management. Deployments. Access control. Backstage gives you the front door and a plugin model to wire it all together. The wiring is where the real work lives.

Join Kelsey Hightower and the OpenChoreo team for an honest look at what it takes to build a complete internal developer platform. We start with the vision: what developers should get from a platform, and what platform teams have to build to deliver it. Then we get concrete. We map the Backstage plugin landscape, show how vanilla Backstage has evolved, and count the glue it takes to turn a portal into a working system. We compare a few common approaches to observability and CI/CD, and show where each one leaves you.

We end with the decision every platform team faces. Build all of this yourself, or adopt something that ships it as one system, like OpenChoreo. For most teams, that means fitting new pieces into a platform they already run, not starting over. We won't tell you which is right. We'll make sure you know what you're signing up for either way.

You'll leave with a clear map of the moving parts, a realistic view of the effort involved, and a framework for the build-versus-adopt call.

Speaker: Kelsey Hightower