Spotify has made available a beta release of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of the open source Backstage portal to provide self-service capabilities to internal developers.
Announced at the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 conference, the SaaS edition of the Backstage internal developer portal (IDP), dubbed Spotify Portal, will make it simpler for organizations to deploy, secure and manage the platform.
Tyson Singer, vice president of technology and platforms for Spotify, told conference attendees Spotify Portal is based on a backend that has substantially evolved since Backstage was first made available under an open source license in 2020. Since then, Spotify has discovered that building and maintaining an IDP for its own purposes is a substantially different endeavor than maintaining an open source project that is relied on by thousands of other organizations.
Backstage is now used by more than 3,000 organizations to provide developers with an ability to self-service their needs within the construct of a larger platform engineering initiative.
It’s not clear how many organizations that have adopted Backstage are deploying it themselves. The one thing that is certain is that there is already no shortage of curated distributions of Backstage, some of which are already being provided via a managed cloud service. Backstage itself requires significant expertise to deploy and maintain, which is a task that many platform engineering teams may prefer to relegate to a service provider. An open source platform provides an assurance that organizations, if necessary, will be able to, if necessary, redeploy that IDP.
IDPs, of course, are core to any platform engineering initiative. Many of these initiatives start with an effort to enable application developers to self-service their own requirements within the context of a set of services curated by a platform engineering team. The goal, as always, is strike a balance between reducing the total cost of software engineering in a way developers will embrace rather than resist.
It’s not clear how widely IDPs are being employed, but a recent Futurum Research survey finds 93% of respondents have embraced platform engineering to varying degrees as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale. The issue, of course, is that most of those organizations are in the early stages of making that transition.
Ultimately, each organization will need to determine what level of platform engineering makes the most sense for their organization. There is little doubt that each additional class of platform added to a software engineering workflow increases cost. However, many of those teams have been conditioned to own the code they build, including the platforms used to build and deploy it.
IDPs are, of course, not necessarily a new idea, but Spotify deserves credit for creating an open source platform that helped make them more accessible. The next challenge is making them simpler to deploy and manage in a way that doesn’t add a level of cost that would essentially make Backstage as expensive as existing proprietary options that might even be a little easier to deploy and manage.