---
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 service 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 Sandbox phase. Read the announcement
[here](https://backstage.io/blog/2020/09/23/backstage-cncf-sandbox).

<img src="https://backstage.io/img/cncf-white.svg" width="400" />
