Spotify’s Backstage Journey

How Spotify grew and Backstage grew with us — from homegrown developer portal to open platform, to commercial plugins, to becoming an industry standard.
A 66-million-year evolutionary journey told in 31,132 pixels.
Out in the world
Inside Spotify
66,000,000 BC
Mar 24
Spreadsheets are born
2012
Mar 24
Microservices become
a thing
2015
Mar 24
Cloud native computing 
becomes a thing
2020
Mar 16
Backstage open source launches on GitHub and Backstage.io
Mar 18
No. 1 on Hacker News  /  Top trending on GitHub   /
1,700 GitHub stars.
Apr 06
First open source plugin launches.
Jun 22
Software Catalog launches.
Aug 05
Software Templates launches.
Aug 05
TechDocs launches.
Sep 23
Accepted into CNCF Sandbox
The Cloud Native Cloud Computing Foundation, home to Kubernetes and Envoy.
Sep 30
Plugin Marketplace launches.
Backstage Design System released.
Oct 22
Cost Insights plugin launches.
Nov 02
Added to the Assess ring on Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar.
Dec 15
Zalando adopts.
Dec 31
8,000+ commits.250+ contributors.
2021
Jan 13
Kubernetes plugin launches.
Jan 15
Expedia Group adopts.
Feb 17
First Backstage 
Community Session
Mar 02
Spotify’s K8s experts participate in Spotify’s first-ever AMA on Reddit about our Kubernetes plugin.
Mar 16
1st Birthday
Mar 19
10,000 GitHub stars.
Apr 13
Added to the Trial ring on Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar.
May 05
Spotify wins the CNCF Top End User Award.
May 19
Netflix adopts.
May 28
PagerDuty adopts.
Jun 18
DAZN adopts.
Jun 22
Launches:
backstage.spotify.com
Everyone’s calendars fill up with meetings with
potential adopters.
Jun 24
Search plugin launches.
Jun 18
DAZN adopts.
Oct 25
Work on permissions framework and RBAC plugin announced.
Nov 04
Backstage Unconference hosted by Frontside and Roadie.
Nov 16
Unity adopts  /  Epic Games adopts.
Dec 31
2,000+ forks
4,000+ Discord members
500+ contributors
75+ public adopters
(Though, we’re still answering the question,
“What is Backstage?”).
2022
Jan 20
HBO Max adopts.
Feb 02
HP adopts.
Feb 03
VMware adopts.
Feb 07
IKEA adopts.
Feb 14
15,000 GitHub stars.
Mar 02
Begin closed beta testing of paid plugins with Klarna, Booz Allen Hamilton, and TELUS.
Mar 03
Snyk adopts.
Mar 10
100 public adopters
Mar 15
Backstage joins CNCF Incubator
Mar 16
2nd Birthday
Mar 17
Backstage 1.0 released
Apr 22
Marks & Spencer adopts.
Apr 27
McKesson adopts.
Jun 12
P&G adopts.
Jun 14
LinkedIn adopts.
Jun 15
Backstage Learn launches
And the world is introduced to Bowie the Backstage Beaver.
Jun 20
Mercedes-Benz adopts.
Jun 28
Cloud Carbon Footprint plugin released with Thoughtworks.
Jul 19
Search 1.0 released.
Jul 29
Fidelity Investments adopts.
Aug 19
80+ open source plugins in the Plugin Marketplace.
Sep 28
Marks & Spencer adopts.
Oct 24
First-ever BackstageCon
Hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Detroit.
Oct 25
Red Hat joins the Backstage community.
Oct 26
Added to the Adopt ring in Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar
Dec 01
547+ total adopters (including public and private).
Dec 15
Spotify Plugins for Backstage launch
Paid plugin bundle subscription launches as a beta with Soundcheck (Autotune), Skill Exchange, Pulse (EngSat), and two new plugins: RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and Insights.
2023
May 09
Spotify hosts its first Backstage roadmap webinar.
Aug 03
Confidence announced
Spotify’s product experimentation platform is introduced to the world.
Oct 12
Spotify’s second Backstage roadmap webinar.
Nov 08
Spotify wins the CNCF Top End User Award again.
Mar 21
From the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon mainstage in Paris, Taylor Dolezal, the head of ecosystem at The Linux Foundation, shares that Backstage has been the top CNCF project by end user commits for the past several months.
2024
Apr 19
The Backstage community repo launches on GitHub.
Feb 17
Spotify Portal for Backstage launches
Introducing our Spotify-managed IDP: It’s Backstage in a box.
Sep 18
Backend System 1.0 released
The New Backend System becomes the backend system.
Nov 14
First Backstage ContribFest debuts at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Salt Lake City.
Nov 15
Certified Backstage Associate (CBA) launches
The new certification from the CNCF + Linux Foundation Education makes you an official Backstage expert.
Mar 16
Backstage turns 5!
2025
Apr 01
AiKA meets the world
Spotify Plugins for Backstage go GA — and three brand new plugins come to Portal: Data Experience, Confidence Flags, and AiKA.
Jun 04
PagerDuty announces their switch to Portal.
Aug 20
The New Frontend System becomes adoption-ready.
Oct 22
Spotify Portal goes GA
The new, enterprise-ready Portal debuts with SOC 2 compliance, a new Catalog Wizard, new plugin installer, Scaffolder Workflows, Portal Plugin Studio, Soundcheck Tech Insights, and agentic AiKA with MCP server support.
Oct 22
Confidence comes to Portal
The GA release of our full-featured product experimentation platform includes feature flags, A/B tests, rollouts, metrics, and more.2K Games announces adoption of Spotify Portal.
Nov 10
6th BackstageCon
The community reaches 3.4k+ adopters, 1.8k contributors, 7k project forks, 31k GitHub stars, and 250+ open source plugins.
Nov 13
Building an AI-Native Backstage
The Backstage core maintainers share work towards an AI-Native Backstage at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Atlanta, including enhancements to the Actions Registry and additional MCP server support.
Mar 16
Upcoming goals and dreams
2026
Apr 01
DevEx and AI productivity metrics in the Insights plugin.
Jun 04
DevEx and AI productivity metrics in the Insights plugin.
Jun 04
Augmenting AI agents with Portal integrations.
Jun 04
Readymade Scaffolder Workflows for automating onboarding and Day 2 operations.
Jun 04
White labeling Portal: Logo + branding customizations for enterprise customers.
2006
Squads are born
Squads keep building, spreadsheets keep multiplying.
Mar 24
2013
ServiceDB:
our first service catalog
Mar 24
2014
System-Z is born
Going beyond the catalog model, the newly formed Tools squad focuses on building a “developer portal” for authoring and managing backend services from end-to-end.
Mar 24
2015
Growth behind System-Z
System-Z evolves to include templates for creating components in repos, new component types for managing data pipelines, and more — eventually replacing ServiceDB.
May 6
2016
Spotify adopts GCP
May 6
2018
System-Z officially becomes Backstage
One central place for all our software components, resources, tools, tech docs, processes, and best practices — teams start making plugins instead of spreadsheets.
Nov 21
2019
Skill Exchange plugin debuts as a Hack Week project
By EOY, Backstage has 110+ unique plugins built by 50 different teams across Spotify.
Oct 21
280+ squads are using Backstage every day to manage 2,000+ backend services, 300+ websites, 4,000+ data pipelines, and 200+ mobile features.
Dec 31
2020
Backstage open source proof-of-concept wins third prize at Hack Week
Feb 03
Skill Exchange adds mentorships and pair programming.
Aug 21
EngSat Survey plugin launches
Sep 01
Experimentation Platform moves onto Backstage.
Sep 19
Autotune plugin launches
Nov 03
729 employees added to Spotify R&D in 2020.
Dec 31
2021
Skill Exchange adds hack projects.
Feb 09
Autotune adds Security Tiers.
Feb 16
Backstage becomes a Mountain Bet.
Mar 01
Band Manager plugin launches
Nov 03
Backstage becomes a Mountain Bet.
Mar 01
Autotune adds a Fleet Management track.
Sep 09
DataHub plugin launches.
Dec 07
65+ Software Templates
Including Golden Paths for backend, data endpoints, data science tools, and websites, plus automated flows for creating new GCP projects and GKE namespaces.
823 employees added to Spotify R&D in 2021.
Dec 31
2022
Team begins hosting Internal Backstage Community Sessions.
Mar 02
Spotify adopts the open source TechDocs plugin
Rolls out to 100% of users after the team collected and addressed user feedback from three months of internal testing.
Mar 17
Spotify begins adopting open source Search.
Apr 01
EngSat turns two: Compiling insights from eight consecutive quarters of data about our internal R&D community.
Aug 19
Hendrix launches: Spotify’s end-to-end ML Platform gets a new name and a new spot inside Backstage.
Sep 22
Skill Exchange adds TechU.
Sep 28
Backstage Internal Customer Listening Tour, Part 1.
Oct 17
Backstage Internal Customer Listening Tour, Part 2.
Oct 25
2,000+ devs across 450+ squads are managing 10,000+ software components in production at Spotify using Backstage.
Dec 01
2023
AiKA goes live
Spotify’s internal “AI knowledge assistant”, aka AiKA, begins providing 24/7 chatbot support to our developers.
Oct 03
Spotify adopts the open source core: the Software Catalog (farewell, sysmodel) and Scaffolder.
Nov 07
2024
Experimentation at scale: By the end of the year, more than 58 teams had run 520 experiments on Spotify’s mobile home screen alone.
Dec 31
2025
From Fleet Management to agentic AI–powered migrations
Spotify’s background coding agent reaches a new milestone: 1,000 AI-generated pull requests merged into production.
Aug 15
Cost Insights plugin adds a widget that displays each component’s running costs on its Catalog entity page.
Sep 16
“The business is healthy. We’re shipping faster than ever.” — Daniel Ek
Spotify ships over 30 new features in the fall and reports double-digit growth in subscribers (281M, up 12% YoY) and monthly active users (700M, up 11% YoY).
Nov 04

What will we build next
together?

Thank you!
Made with
at Spotify
All the squads that partnered with us to build, test, and test again.
Our Platform friends and partners throughout Spotify, including Consumer Comms, Security, Legal, Finance, the OSPO, Platform PMO, and Platform Product Marketing.
And anyone who’s ever contributed to or submitted feedback about Backstage.