This is a human, on-the-ground story of how we hit a scaling wall at Apna, what we tried, why Backstage.io won, and the exact ROI and metrics that made leadership lean in.
When Growth Hurts: The Everyday Pain at 300+ Developers
We grew fast. From a scrappy team of 10 to 300+ engineers. The dashboards looked great—until you talked to the developers.
- “I spent half a day figuring out which repo owns payments.”
- “Onboarding feels like detective work.”
- “I need a Postgres DB—why three tickets?”
The problem wasn’t a missing tool; it was too many tools and no single front door. We needed an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to make the golden path the easiest path.
Our Evaluation: Backstage.io vs Crossplane (and Why Backstage Won)
We formed a small platform tiger team and compared two strong candidates:
Crossplane (infra self-service)
- Great for provisioning cloud resources safely.
- Excellent abstraction over IaC.
- We still use it under the hood.
Backstage.io (developer experience)
- First-class service catalog & discoverability.
- Golden path templates (scaffolder) for new services.
- Rich plugin ecosystem for CI/CD, docs, SLOs, cost, etc.
Our bottleneck wasn’t infra capacity; it was developer time. People rebuilt services that already existed because they couldn’t find them. That’s why Backstage.io became the face of our IDP, with Crossplane powering self-service behind the scenes.
Implementation Roadmap: Ship It Like a Product
We rolled out in phases, collecting feedback and shipping value every quarter.
Phase 1 (0–3 months): Foundation
- Deployed Backstage with a unified service catalog.
- Onboarded 300+ repos, pipelines, and APIs; added ownership metadata.
- Integrated Git hosting, CI/CD (e.g., Jenkins/Argo), and observability.
Phase 2 (3–6 months): Golden Paths
- Created templates for Node, Java, Python services.
- One click → repo + CI/CD + monitoring + docs + SLO starter.
- New services shipped in days, not weeks.
Phase 3 (6–9 months): Self-Service Infra
- Wired Backstage to Crossplane for approved DBs, queues, storage.
- Developers provisioned resources without opening tickets.
- Guardrails via policies and cost limits.
Phase 4 (9–12 months): Governance & Maturity
- Added cost dashboards by team and service.
- Policy checks (e.g., OPA) and security scorecards.
- Surfaced SLOs/error budgets alongside runbooks and alerts.
ROI: The Simple Math That Convinced Leadership
We kept the model transparent and conservative.
| Area | Before | After | Annual Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Developer productivity | ~25% time lost to friction | ~10% time lost | ≈ $6.7M saved (300 devs × avg cost) |
| Onboarding time | 4 weeks | 1 week | ≈ $1.2M saved (60 hires/year) |
| Ops/SRE tickets | High, many handoffs | Lower via self-service | ≈ $0.5M saved |
| Total Year-1 Benefit | ≈ $8.5M | ||
| Platform Team Cost (≈10 engineers) | ≈ $2.0M | ||
| Net ROI | ~4× | ||
Bottom line: reclaiming developer time pays for the platform several times over. The “hidden tax” of context hunting, slow onboarding, and ticket queues is very real—and fixable.
How We Measured Developer Productivity
We tied outcomes to DORA and adjacent metrics:
- Service creation lead time: 10 days → 2 days.
- Onboarding: 4 weeks → 1 week.
- Deployment frequency: +30% across teams.
- Lead time for changes: ~40% improvement.
- Time to find docs/owners: down ~70% via the catalog.
We published these metrics in the portal so teams could see their own trends and celebrate gains.
Our Platform Maturity Journey
- Ad hoc — every team rolls their own.
- Centralized — shared tools, inconsistent adoption.
- Standardized — golden paths, catalog, docs.
- Self-service — devs provision infra/pipelines (Apna today).
- Optimized — automated governance, cost/perf tuning by default.
Backstage.io was the accelerator that moved us from Level 2 → Level 4 in under a year, with Crossplane providing safe self-service behind the scenes.
FAQs
Can you use Backstage without Crossplane?
Yes. Backstage is your developer-facing portal; you can back it with Terraform, internal platforms, or Crossplane for self-service.
What’s the fastest first win?
Launch the catalog and one golden-path template (service + CI/CD + monitoring). Make finding and starting work radically easier.Key takeaway: Treat the platform like a product. Build with empathy, measure relentlessly, and make the golden path irresistible. For us at Apna, putting Backstage.io at the center of the IDP unlocked 4× ROI and happier developers.