Backstage Software Catalog Lifecycle: Discover, Register, and Govern Your Software Assets
Backstage Software Catalog Lifecycle: Discover, Register, and Govern Your Software Assets The Backstage catalog is not just a directory of services. It is a lifecycle that starts with entity descriptors, moves through registration and backend processing, and only stays useful when ownership, relations, and cleanup are governed deliberately. TL;DR A healthy Backstage catalog is a lifecycle, not a one-time YAML import. Teams define entities in catalog-info.yaml , register them through locations or discovery, and let the catalog ingest, process, and stitch the final entity view. The fields that make the catalog operationally useful are usually owner , system , lifecycle , dependency relations, and API relations. Backstage provides governance controls such as catalog rules, readonly mode, and orphan handling. If you only optimize for registration, the catalog becomes stale inventory. If you optimize for source-of-truth ownership and cleanup, it becomes a useful platform ...