ING tackled developer portal sprawl (60+ disparate tools) by adopting Backstage.io as their unified front-end standard. The talk outlines their specific architectural choices and governance models to scale Backstage without it becoming a monolithic bottleneck or crashing due to community plugins.

- To prevent a single bad plugin from crashing the portal, ING separates core services (like the software catalog, which handles hundreds of thousands of entities and has dedicated DB tuning) from community/external plugins, running them on separate instances.
- To avoid costly rewrites of legacy services, internal teams can use a backend proxy plugin to connect existing backend tools into the Backstage UI.
- Built a custom plugin to solve ownership issues in complex, cross-domain workflows.
- Because anyone can contribute, ING enforces a "Contribution Plugin" workflow
- They drove adoption by focusing heavily on Developer Experience (local setups, playgrounds) while simultaneously having their Technology Standards Board mandate Backstage for all new internal UI initiatives.

https://tldrecap.tech/posts/2026/backstagecon-europe/ing-backstage-scaling-developer-platform/