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 […]
Service Map: Visualisiere deine Microservice-Architektur ohne SaaS-Abonnement
TL;DR — Architekturdokumentation veraltet, sobald sie außerhalb der Codebasis lebt — kein Review-Prozess erzwingt eine Aktualisierung, wenn eine Abhängigkeit im Code geändert wird. Service Map löst das: YAML-Dateien im Repository sind die einzige Wahrheitsquelle, aus denen ein interaktiver, filterbarer Abhängigkeitsgraph generiert wird. Selbst-gehostet, kein SaaS-Abonnement, einmalig 99 EUR für unbegrenzte interne Nutzung. Wenn du in […]
Service Map: Visualize Your Microservice Architecture Without the SaaS Tax
TL;DR — Architecture documentation rots because it lives outside the codebase — no pull request enforces an update when a dependency is added in code. Service Map fixes this by making YAML files in your Git repo the single source of truth, rendering them into an always-current interactive dependency graph. Self-hosted, no SaaS subscription, no […]
