Backstage Is Overkill for Most Teams. Here’s What to Use Instead.
TL;DR — Backstage is an excellent tool for large organizations building a full internal developer portal. For teams that need service dependency visualization and a service catalog, it’s significant infrastructure overhead for one feature. A YAML-based, static-file alternative gives you 80% of the value in an afternoon, with zero backend to maintain. Backstage, Spotify’s open-source […]
Self-Hosted vs SaaS Architecture Diagram Tools: An Honest Comparison
TL;DR — SaaS architecture diagram tools work well until they don’t: per-seat pricing that grows with your team, topology data leaving your infrastructure, and vendor lock-in on your system documentation. Self-hosted alternatives eliminate all three — at the cost of a small one-time setup investment. For most engineering teams, that trade is obvious. The architecture […]
