Build your Software Catalog
with Backstage
Get your Internal Developer Portal started
with Backstage on AWS
The Software Catalog: foundation of the Internal Developer Portal
An internal developer portal organizes that data. So you can quickly train new developers. So they can find important application building or modification documentation.
Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of organisations with platform engineering teams will provide internal developer portals to improve developer experience and accelerate product innovation.
The Software Catalog provides a single view for managing all your software (microservices, libraries, data pipelines, websites, ML models, etc.)

What is Backstage
Backstage was created by Spotify's engineering team to solve their own need for an Internal Developer Portal. It was so successful they decided to open source it.
Backstage is now an incubation project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Backstage has been adopted by many leading companies, and has a thriving user community.
Learn more about the Backstage project at https://backstage.io
What you will learn
At the completion of the course, you'll be able to:
- Install Backstage on AWS
- Map your Organisation’s Tech Stack to Backstage's data model
- Create a Software Catalog that lists all your organisation's applications, APIs and databases
Who the course is for
This course is for platform engineers, cloud engineers or aspiring tech professionals who want to establish a working instance of Backstage to demonstrate to colleagues, compile a catalog of all your organisation's applications, but without having to read all the documentation first.
What you will need
All you need to start is:
- A willingness to learn
- Familiarity with standard tools like Visual Studio Code
- Administrative rights to install software on your own PC or Mac
- An AWS account
Course Content
- About the course
- Prerequisites - what you need
- Why do you need an Internal Developer Portal?
- What is in an Internal Developer Portal
- Why Backstage
- The Software Catalog
- Entities
- The Scaffolder
- TechDocs
- Plugins
- Install local tools
- Create your Backstage app locally
- Setup AWS environment
- Establish secrets and security
- Install the TechDocs plugin
- Create Docker Compose file and image
- Deploy image to AWS
- Resolving Common Errors
- Backstage Entities
- Mapping your Organisation to Backstage Entities
- Descriptor File
- Registering Components in the Backstage UI
- Resolving errors
- Navigating the Software Catalog
- Building on the foundation
- Opportunities enabled by your IDP
- Production requirements