CASE 72 · VELLUM · 2024
A service catalog the platform team didn’t have to nag people to update.
An enterprise SaaS company had a Backstage installation with 12 services registered out of an actual 73 in production. Engineers had been asked to register; nobody had. We rebuilt the registration as a build-time emission, so services registered themselves on first push.
Enterprise SaaS
PLATFORM
2024
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
CATALOG COVERAGE
73 / 73
ENGINEER MANUAL UPDATES
0
OWNERSHIP DATA
100%
CATALOG SEARCH USAGE
+340%
HOW IT WENT
The first time the platform team tried to populate the catalog, they asked nicely. The second time, they asked less nicely. The third time, leadership got involved. Engineers eventually registered their services with placeholder data and never updated.
We rebuilt registration as a build-time emission. Every CI build of every service ran a step that emitted a `catalog-info.yaml` derived from the repo’s package manifest, the Terraform module configuration, and the GitHub team ownership. The catalog imported it automatically; no engineer touched it.
Catalog coverage went from 16% to 100% in two weeks. Ownership data is current because it’s derived from authoritative sources (CODEOWNERS, Terraform). The catalog became useful enough that search traffic grew 340% — engineers actually look things up there now.
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