Your Backstage Portal Can Do More: Kratix Shows What’s Possible

In a previous post, we explored how Kratix and Backstage work together: Backstage provides a centralised service catalogue and developer hub, making service discovery effortless, while Kratix empowers platform teams to build and operate composable platforms, seamlessly handling both day-one provisioning and ongoing operations. 

By integrating Kratix with Backstage, you transform a portal into a fully managed platform. 

Kratix orchestrates fleet management, automates upgrades and enforces consistency for every service surfaced in Backstage, so your platform engineers spend less time on operations and more time delivering value.

The Challenges of Backstage at Scale: Don’t Forget About Day 2

Backstage delivers a unified, customisable developer portal, yet its very flexibility can become a burden in large organisations. 

Plugins require constant updates, catalogue data must remain in sync with your platform, and inventories need regular curation to surface only the services and components that matter. Modern engineering platforms expose multiple interfaces—CLI tools, Backstage’s UI and internal APIs—each of which must enforce identical permissions. 

Allowing even a single discrepancy can open a “backdoor” for bad actors to exploit. We often see customers struggle to roll out security policies uniformly, ending up with a fragmented patchwork instead of a centralised, coherent model.

Backstage’s extensible plugin architecture is a game-changer: teams can grab a marketplace extension or build their own in days rather than months. Yet custom plugins quickly become mission-critical code, dragging your engineers into endless upgrade cycles and emergency fixes whenever a dependency is bumped. 

And once you’ve launched your portal, the work does not stop. Upgrades, maintenance windows, policy tweaks and catalogue audits pile up, each adding cognitive load and pulling your platform team away from higher-value initiatives.

Promises Made, Promises Kept: Using Kratix to Simplify Backstage Management

Kratix lets platform teams define every component of their platform as-a-service using Promises. 

When you pair Kratix with Backstage via our Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) Backstage plugins, those Promises automatically populate your Backstage catalogue and keep other relevant views updated with real-time data from your Kratix platform. The result is that the services your organisation relies on can be provisioned quickly, securely and with minimal overhead.

Promises in Kratix keep your platform logic clean and focused. The SKE Backstage plugins build on that foundation by generating bespoke Backstage entities for each Promise and its associated resources. Backstage delivers an intuitive user interface for provisioning, while Kratix handles the complex orchestration behind the scenes. 

Furthermore, Kratix manages day-two operations for you, performing seamless upgrades of Promises, so your team can focus on shipping high-value features faster and more reliably.

In the latest release, our SKE Backstage plugins also unify access control by treating your Kubernetes cluster as the single source of truth. Permissions and security updates flow directly from the cluster, removing the need for workarounds. With support for OIDC authentication, these plugins integrate seamlessly into your existing security setup.

Recent Enhancements for Kratix + Backstage: Real-time Status Updates, K8s RBAC, and More

Earlier versions of our SKE Backstage plugins used a GitOps-based StateStore, which could cause delays in status updates and didn’t enforce permissions at the cluster level. In the latest release, the plugins talk directly to Kubernetes for real-time resource management, while the Backstage catalogue stays versioned in the StateStore—giving us both speed and consistency

This hybrid approach delivers real-time status updates in Backstage and full management of resources created outside the portal. We also added the ability to use Kubernetes-based RBAC for Backstage authentication and authorisation, so a user with read-only cluster permissions cannot perform create, update or delete actions in Backstage. 

Finally, platform teams can now import our two Kratix-specific frontend components into their own plugins, making it easier than ever to embed Kratix functionality in custom Backstage experiences.

For a complete list of these enhancements, please refer to our changelog in the SKE documentation.

Turn Your Backstage Portal into a Platform

Backstage brings powerful developer portal capabilities, and Kratix integrations simplify its ongoing management. Together, they enable platform teams to build internal developer platforms that are easy to use, secure and maintainable. 

If you’re ready to integrate Backstage with Kratix and enjoy these benefits, get in touch for a detailed demo and guidance on getting started quickly. 

You can also explore our SKE documentation and the Backstage and Kratix solutions pages for more information.