Backstage in Practice: Offloading Developer Operational Work Through Platform Self-Service

As engineering organizations scale, developers often spend significant time on manual operational work that distracts from product development and slows delivery. In this talk, we share our practical experience using Backstage to offload manual tasks from developers and enable a platform-driven self-service model. We explain how we identified repetitive operational tasks and transformed them into standardized self-service workflows using Backstage software templates. Through form-based self-service, developers can trigger common operational tasks in a consistent and automated way without direct platform team involvement.

A key part of this journey was ensuring security and governance while enabling self-service. We will dive into how we implemented validation and user authenticity checks using Backstage custom actions. Attendees will leave with concrete guidance on designing effective self-service workflows.

To make the session hands-on, we will conclude with a live demonstration of running one of our Backstage sample templates, highlighting the end-to-end workflow from self-service form to operational execution.

This talk is aimed at Developers, platform engineers and DevOps teams looking for real-world, production tested insights into building self-service with Backstage.