Building a state-of-the-art development platform with Backstage
Backstage solves the developer portal problem but not the platform problem. Many organizations end up with a fragile 'messy middle' of point-to-point integrations between Backstage and their CI/CD, GitOps, Kubernetes, and observability tools. The solution is a three-layer architecture: a portal (Backstage), a control plane that compiles developer abstractions into Kubernetes resources, reconciles drift, and aggregates runtime state, and a data plane where workloads run. Developer abstractions (components, endpoints, dependencies) and platform abstractions (environments, pipelines, traits) are kept separate. The control plane bridges them, enabling unified observability, policy enforcement, and AI agent integration. OpenChoreo is presented as an open-source CNCF sandbox reference implementation of this architecture.