At Firefly, we believe that infrastructure management shouldn't pull developers away from their workflow. That's why we're excited to introduce our comprehensive Backstage integration: bringing cloud infrastructure visibility, IaC coverage tracking, and resource management directly into the developer portal where your teams already spend their day.
We're committed to embedding infrastructure intelligence into the tools developers already know and trust. And with Firefly's Backstage plugin, teams can now monitor IaC coverage, track cloud resource drift, and understand infrastructure dependencies without ever leaving their service catalog.
The Infrastructure Visibility Gap in Developer Portals
Platform engineering teams are increasingly adopting internal developer portals like Backstage to create self-service experiences that reduce friction and accelerate delivery. According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have platform teams providing reusable services and standardized tooling. These portals excel at consolidating service documentation, CI/CD workflows, and deployment automation into a single pane of glass.
But there's a critical gap: infrastructure visibility.
While developers can see service catalogs and deployment pipelines in Backstage, understanding the actual cloud resources powering those services (and whether they're properly managed as code) typically requires jumping to separate dashboards and cloud consoles. This fragmentation creates blind spots in infrastructure governance and slows down troubleshooting when issues arise.
That's the problem we're solving.
By embedding Firefly's infrastructure intelligence directly into Backstage, we're closing the loop between service ownership and infrastructure reality, helping teams maintain governance and visibility without disrupting developer workflows. When developers can see IaC coverage alongside their service dependencies, teams naturally shift toward better infrastructure practices while maintaining the velocity that platform engineering promises.
"Firefly's integration with Backstage helps us bridge the gap between our service catalog and the actual infrastructure running underneath. Now our developers can see drift and coverage metrics right where they're already working." – Early Access Customer
Three Ways Firefly Transforms Cloud Infrastructure Management in Backstage
Our Backstage integration delivers immediate value across three critical dimensions that help platform teams establish infrastructure governance without creating developer friction:
1) Unify infrastructure visibility with service ownership
Scattered infrastructure data across multiple cloud consoles and management tools creates information silos that slow down debugging and make it harder to enforce governance policies. Developers lose valuable time piecing together which resources belong to which services, especially in complex microservices architectures.
Firefly's Backstage plugin automatically imports your cloud resources as catalog entities and intelligently correlates them with existing service components using tag-based and name-based matching. This creates a unified view where infrastructure dependencies become first-class citizens in your service catalog.
The result? Developers see exactly which cloud resources power their services, understand infrastructure dependencies at a glance, and can quickly identify ownership when issues occur. Platform teams gain comprehensive visibility into infrastructure governance without forcing developers to learn new tools.
2) Surface IaC coverage where it matters most
Infrastructure drift and unmanaged resources create security risks, compliance headaches, and unexpected costs. Yet tracking IaC coverage typically requires specialized dashboards that live outside developer workflows, making it easy for coverage gaps to grow unnoticed until they become critical problems.
With Firefly's frontend plugin, every service component page in Backstage now displays IaC coverage metrics directly alongside dependency graphs and deployment information. Developers immediately see whether their infrastructure is managed as code, drifted from source, or completely unmanaged: without leaving the context of the service they're working on.
The dedicated Firefly dashboard provides a bird's-eye view across your entire infrastructure estate, highlighting the top components with coverage issues and showing organization-wide IaC adoption trends. This visibility drives accountability and makes infrastructure governance a natural part of the development process rather than an afterthought.
3) Automate infrastructure discovery and relationship mapping
Manually maintaining relationships between services and their underlying cloud resources is tedious, error-prone, and doesn't scale as infrastructure grows. Documentation falls out of date quickly, and discovering which resources support which services becomes archaeological work.
Firefly's backend plugin automatically syncs your cloud infrastructure into Backstage on a configurable schedule, creating and updating resource entities and system relationships without manual intervention. The smart correlation engine uses your existing tagging strategy to map resources to components, while flexible filtering ensures you only import what matters to your organization.
This automation keeps your service catalog synchronized with infrastructure reality, enabling teams to trust the relationships they see in Backstage. When developers need to understand blast radius during incidents or plan infrastructure changes, they can rely on accurate, up-to-date dependency information.
How to Get Started: Step-By-Step with Firefly
Ready to bring infrastructure visibility into your Backstage portal? Check out our comprehensive integration guide for step-by-step setup instructions.
Explore the code directly in our GitHub repository, or see the integration in action in our demo video.
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