Learn: Developer Experience
How a developer ships on this platform: state intent, get governed infrastructure back, without learning Crossplane, ArgoCD, Kyverno, or IAM. There are two surfaces. Backstage is a single pane of glass to see everything; the scaffolder hands out golden-path templates to create things. Every change is a pull request the platform reconciles.
Audience: developers shipping on the platform, and the platform engineers who build the paved road. Before you start: read the domain model — it’s the vocabulary the portal renders, and the one prerequisite here.
Read in this order
Section titled “Read in this order”- Orientation — the paved road: intent in, a PR out, reconciled infra. Covers the BACK stack, the two surfaces (Backstage and the scaffolder), and self-service with guardrails. The metaphor is a storefront over a warehouse, where every order is a mail-order form.
- Reference — the dense lookup: the BACK stack, the Backstage module (catalog projection, auth, plugins), the scaffolder templates and engine, the guardrails, the status ledger, and the gotchas.
Go deep
Section titled “Go deep”- The Backstage portal — the catalog as a projection of git (Team→Group, Product→System, Environment), direct Keycloak OIDC, the read-only scoped plugins (Kubernetes / ArgoCD / Cost), and the app-vs-infra split that trips everyone up.
- The scaffolder golden paths — the ten templates, three
of them traced form → PR → registry → provision (new-product, new-environment, request-promotion), the
scaffolder engine (schema + Nunjucks + custom
platform:*actions), and self-service with guardrails.
- What the portal renders: the domain model. Where a form’s PR goes:
the Environment API and Delivery.
The hand-authored counterpart: the
environment-onboardinghouse skill.