Backstage IDP with Terraform IaC

What is Backstage?

Backstage is an open-source platform designed to help developers create Internal Developer Portals (IDPs). Think of IDPs as a central hub where you can manage all your software resources, like CI/CD pipelines, documentation, APIs, and more. With an IDP, developers can streamline their workflows without relying heavily on DevOps

Flow diagram for Backstage/GitHub/Terraform/Cloud Providers

Control flow in IDP and IaC using Backstage and Terraform

Backstage Pre-reqs

Before diving into Backstage templates, ensure you have the following ready:

Backstage is deployed — Follow the Backstage Getting Started Guide if you need help.

GitHub Integration — Backstage is connected to your GitHub repository.

Terraform Setup:

Working Terraform code in a GitHub repository to deploy an EC2 instance (Details Out of scope of this blog)

A GitHub Actions workflow file to execute Terraform commands (Details Out of scope of this blog)

AWS and GitHub — While this guide uses AWS and GitHub, you can adapt it for other CI/CD tools and cloud providers

What are Backstage templates?

Backstage provides a software catalog to manage resources like CI/CD pipelines, APIs, microservices, and more. To add a new resource to this catalog, you use templates.

Templates in Backstage are structured like Kubernetes manifests, so if you’re familiar with Kubernetes, you’ll find this easy. Below is a simple Backstage template to create an AWS EC2 instance

apiVersion: scaffolder.backstage.io/v1beta3
kind: Template
metadata:
 name: ec2-demo
 title: EC2 Instance Creation
 description: A template to create an AWS EC2 instance using Terraform.
spec:
 owner: guest
 type: service
 parameters:
 - title: EC2 Instance Configuration
 required:
 - InstanceName
 - Region
 - InstanceType
 properties:
 InstanceName:
 title: Instance Name
 type: string
 description: Name of the instance.
 Region:
 title: AWS Region
 type: string
 description: AWS region (e.g., us-east-1, ap-south-1).
 InstanceType:
 title: Instance Type
 type: string
 description: Type of instance (e.g., t2.micro, t3.medium).
 enum…