How a Developer Portal Transformed an Engineering Organization

A growing engineering team, distributed across multiple product squads, was facing increasing complexity in their internal ecosystem. With over 100 services in production and new engineers joining regularly, it had become difficult to answer basic questions like: What services exist? Who owns them? How do I start a new one? How do I know it meets our standards?

To address this, the platform team introduced an internal developer portal using Backstage. They focused first on cataloging their services, generating new projects through templates, and improving documentation. These changes had an immediate impact: onboarding improved, service discovery became easier, and common workflows were streamlined.

But as adoption grew, new needs emerged. Managing access to portal features was manual and difficult to scale. Teams wanted to restrict who could run certain templates or view sensitive information. At the same time, leadership was asking questions about how the portal was being used, but there was no built-in way to measure usage or engagement.

To address these, the team extended Backstage with more advanced plugins, including role-based access control and usage insights. This gave them fine-grained control over access, integrated with their existing identity provider, and visibility into which templates, services, and plugins were getting the most use. They could finally treat their portal like a real product — measuring, prioritizing, and improving based on data.

While this team had the resources and expertise to build and evolve their platform internally, many organizations face similar challenges without the capacity to invest months into getting there. That’s where Avalia’s DxHub comes in.

DxHub builds on the solid foundation of Backstage and enhances it with Avalia’s deep experience in platform engineering. It offers a production-ready platform out of the box — with best-practice defaults, managed plugin integrations, secure access controls, and actionable analytics already in place.

Importantly, Avalia doesn’t lock you into a black-box service. With DxHub, clients own their source code — including the platform customizations, configurations, and templates — giving them full flexibility and control as their needs evolve. Avalia provides the scaffolding and expertise to get you running fast, with the freedom to shape your developer experience on your terms.

Backstage is an excellent starting point. DxHub helps you go further, faster — with less overhead, more confidence, and full ownership of your platform.