CASE 24 · VECTOR · 2026
Backstage, but only the parts that earned their keep.
An enterprise SaaS company had eighty services, fifty engineers, and three different ways to provision new infrastructure depending on which platform engineer you asked. We built a Backstage IDP with three golden paths — each one ten minutes from idea to running service — and resisted the temptation to add more.
Enterprise SaaS
PLATFORM
2026
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
NEW SERVICE PROVISIONING
10m
GOLDEN PATHS
3
PLATFORM TICKETS
−68%
TIME TO FIRST DEPLOY
< 1h
HOW IT WENT
The platform team had a backlog of forty "would be nice" features for the IDP. We deferred all of them. The first conversation set three golden paths: a web API, a worker process, and a scheduled batch job. Every existing service we surveyed fit one of those three shapes. The other paths could come later.
Each golden path was a Backstage software template that scaffolded a repo, registered service metadata, applied a Terraform module set (via Crossplane in EKS), and configured the deployment pipeline. OPA policies enforced what the golden path allowed and rejected what it didn’t. Deviation was possible but required explicit override.
After ninety days, 68% of platform tickets had disappeared. The platform team had time to work on the fourth golden path (which turned out to be a stream processor, not anything on the original "would be nice" list). New hires shipped their first PR in under a day.
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