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Hi Matt, super question. I only watched a little of the presentation, but I've been doing some work to help people use mapping to advance - especially around IT transformation and change. I would treat Backstage as a "Developer Portal" capability. The question I would ask - "is Dev portal a genesis/custom/product/commodity" capability. The existence of BS (& many others) pushes it over to the left. So, the decision would be Buy a DP or Build the best DP in the business. I would guess that Netflix don't want to get into the business of building Developer Portals, the scale they are at. Hope that helps. (BTW, the risk of choosing a vendor is probably it's own map...)

One framing that helped us decide to move forward with Backstage is that of a Type 1 vs. Type 2 decision. By investing our resources into building “portal ui components” that deliver our experiences, we recognized that the underlying platform was in fact replaceable, and could be swapped out if/when needed. Building on top of Backstage was a type 2 decision that gave us a velocity boost in many regards, and we’ve been able to drop or replace various backstage technologies as required throughout our development.

Thanks to you both for your responses, especially chuffed to have had the video author himself comment. Using backstage as an accelerant and replacing as needed makes a lot of sense to me, especially while we're trying to get buy in for the whole idea of an IDP. I suppose what concerns me with selecting a vendor / product based IDP solution is the question of what happens when we outgrow our vendor's architecture or have a need that doesn't fit well with the vendor's capabilities. With backstage we have more avenues to extend and tweak -- given that it's OSS and has a plugin architecture, but I could also see outgrowing core aspects of Backstage's architecture -- especially around the service registry and search capabilities. For example, maybe we want the interface for searching our dev portal to be an LLM prompt or something -- just thinking out loud. How easy would it be to bake that into backstage vs another vendor vs our own in-house solution, and how risky would it be to not be able to deliver that capability in a timely manner when the entire company's developer productivity is tied to this tool / user interface.