Platform engineering has emerged as the natural progression of DevOps—not a replacement as some may think, but rather more of a refinement. While DevOps broke down silos and encouraged shared responsibility, it often left teams fending for themselves across sprawling infrastructure stacks. Developers were promised autonomy, but were instead overwhelmed by the burden of managing CI/CD, security, observability, infrastructure provisioning, and more. This resulted in a generation burdened by cognitive overload––and surprisingly oftentimes slower delivery, and fragmented workflows. Around a decade or so after the DevOps movement kickstarted, platform engineering came onto the scene to address these challenges by creating more accessible and organized internal platforms—composed of reusable capabilities, service compositions, and automations that encode organization-wide standards such as: security requirements, best practices, and governance policies, into discoverable, self-service workflows. Unlike the ad hoc toolchains of early DevOps, these platforms emphasize usability, consistency, and discoverability. They aren’t just collections of scripts or dashboards—they are curated experiences that abstract away complexity while empowering development teams to move faster, more safely. One of the most visible ways organizations bring platform engineering to life is through Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). But at the same time, not every developer portal qualifies as a true platform. As the CNCF points out in its Platforms White Paper, an internal platform must reduce cognitive load, enable self-service, and be built with a product mindset. This means treating developers as customers—delivering clear documentation, sensible defaults, paved paths, and strong support. A static homepage or service catalog simply won’t cut it. A true IDP is an interface to the underlying platform—and the glue that connects infrastructure capabilities with developer experience. From Vision to Interface: How Backstage Brought Platform Engineering to Life The shift from DevOps to platform engineering may have begun as a cultural or architectural change—but it becomes real when developers have a tangible place to work. That’s where Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) step in: they bridge the gap between platform capabilities and the developer experience. And few tools have embodied this mission more clearly than Backstage. Backstage was born inside Spotify, where hundreds of engineering teams needed consistent access to services, infrastructure, and documentation. The problem wasn’t a lack of tools—it was that every team had their own, creating a fragmented, high-friction experience. Backstage was Spotify’s answer to that sprawl: a unified, extensible developer portal that put self-service, service catalogs, golden paths, and documentation in one place. What started as an internal tool quickly resonated with the broader community, leading Spotify to open source it and ultimately donate it to the CNCF. The decision to bring Backstage under the CNCF wasn’t just about open governance—it was a philosophical fit. Kubernetes had already become the de facto infrastructure layer for cloud-native applications. Backstage offered a way to make that complexity consumable. Together, they represent two halves of a modern platform: Kubernetes as the foundation, Backstage as the front door. Backstage’s plugin architecture lets platform teams tailor experiences to their organization’s needs—without reinventing the wheel. It abstracts infrastructure complexity behind APIs and workflows, enabling developers to spin up services, deploy code, and track reliability without worrying about YAML, Helm charts, or cluster access. In doing so, it turns platform engineering from a theory into a daily practice—reducing cognitive load while improving governance, reuse, and speed. Komodor + Backstage: Making Kubernetes a First-Class Citizen in Your Internal Platform Kubernetes is the infrastructure backbone of modern platforms—but for most developers, it still feels like a black box. Even with Backstage in place, the Kubernetes “tile” often shows little more than metadata, raw manifests, or links to external dashboards. It’s a shallow integration that leaves developers hitting a wall when it matters most—during incidents, deployments, or debugging sessions. They often have no visibility into what’s happening post-deployment, no mental model for Kubernetes internals, and no idea where to start. Context isn’t just scattered—it’s inaccessible.. That’s where Komodor comes in. While Backstage excels at centralizing the developer experience, Komodor brings Kubernetes to life within it. Komodor surfaces real-time status, recent changes, health insights, and actionable alerts—transforming Backstage from a static registry into a dynamic operations cockpit. It also brings an operational lens directly into the IDP, collapsing the silos between observability, reliability, and deployment tools. What would normally require switching between Prometheus, Grafana, and alerting dashboards is now visible in a single, developer-friendly interface. This unified view makes operational ownership more accessible and actionable. It gives developers the context they need to understand what changed, when, and why it matters. Rollback failed deployment? Investigate a crash loop? Triage an alert? It’s all there, in one unified view. From a platform engineering perspective, this is critical. According to the CNCF Platform Engineering Maturity Model, successful platforms must reduce cognitive load, enable self-service, and foster a participatory ecosystem. Komodor hits all three. Developers no longer need to escalate every incident to DevOps or SRE—they can investigate and resolve issues on their own, directly through the portal they already use. That’s how platforms move from extrinsic push (mandated use) to intrinsic pull (adoption driven by real value). And Komodor doesn’t just help developers—it empowers platform teams, too. With multi-cluster views, RBAC user and permissions management, and built-in automated incident remediation playbooks, Komodor acts as a Day-2 operations layer. It enables proactive reliability engineering, improves MTTR, and aligns with DORA metrics—all within the Backstage ecosystem. This evolves a typical IDP from a fancy front door into a true internal product - and this can be measured in tangible metrics: Adoption grows Incident volume drops Platform ownership deepens Just to name a few. And your internal platform becomes what the CNCF envisioned: a curated experience that helps teams ship faster, safer, and with far less friction. Backstage laid the groundwork for developer platforms, and together with Komodor they are today much more Kubernetes-native. Use Case: Empowering Developers While Strengthening Platform Control Let’s take a real concrete example of how this works in typical engineering organizations. A large engineering organization built an IDP with Backstage to streamline service scaffolding, deployment automation, and infrastructure provisioning. Developers benefited from golden path templates and faster onboarding, while the platform team consolidated internal tools into a unified interface. But once services were deployed to Kubernetes, visibility dropped. Developers were unable to trace production issues without escalating to SREs. Monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana were technically available but disconnected from developer workflows—requiring manual context-switching and deep K8s expertise. Guardrails were frequently bypassed to unblock delivery, and platform usage waned. To address this, the platform team integrated Komodor with Backstage. Each service page now includes real-time Kubernetes health indicators, workload status, and a change timeline that surfaces key events like pod restarts, config updates, and deployment rollouts. Developers receive guided remediation suggestions via Komodor’s Klaudia, the AI-powered agent for Kubernetes troubleshooting —linked directly from their Backstage workspace. If a pod crashes after a config change, Komodor highlights the delta and suggests a rollback. If a node becomes unstable, Komodor points developers to affected workloads and recent upstream events. For platform engineers, Komodor’s fleet-wide RBAC, K8s cost insights, and API-level access created a secure boundary between infrastructure ownership and application self-service. They built curated views for different teams and began enforcing policies that routed K8s interactions through Komodor—eliminating kubectl sprawl and maintaining audit trails. Komodor: The Kubernetes Integration Your IDP Needs As internal developer platforms mature, Kubernetes often lags behind. CI/CD, secrets management, database provisioning—all get attention and clean interfaces. Kubernetes, on the other hand, remains a fragmented, complex layer that few developers feel comfortable navigating. Komodor fills that gap with a developer-centric, secure gateway to Kubernetes that integrates directly into your IDP—regardless of whether it’s built with Backstage, Port, or another framework. Komodor acts as a contextual abstraction layer, surfacing just enough of Kubernetes to empower developers—without overwhelming them. It brings monitoring, cost insights, RBAC visibility, alerting, and real-time health management into a unified, human-readable interface. With robust APIs, platform engineers can surface exactly the right Kubernetes data inside any IDP portal, reducing time-to-insight and increasing developer autonomy. The result is a more practical and scalable model: Developers gain the ability to diagnose and resolve Kubernetes issues on their own, without needing to understand every detail of the infrastructure. Platform teams maintain control through policy enforcement, RBAC, and visibility across clusters. With Komodor embedded in the IDP, Kubernetes becomes fully integrated into day-to-day workflows—helping teams hit key metrics like DORA such as improving reliability and reducing MTTR, all from a single unified portal and platform.
