The process of populating the service catalog in Backstage involves generating “entities”. These entities can encompass various aspects, such as teams, domains, and others related to the services within your infrastructure. As Backstage ingests these entities, it uses them to populate its service catalog, creating a comprehensive overview of all the services.

However, at this point, we haven’t yet installed Backstage. Because the installation of Backstage is a prerequisite for this entity generation process, we will look into the details of how to create these entities and integrate them into Backstage in a later section specifically dedicated to Backstage.

But to give you a brief overview, the process generally involve a specialized generators that are designed to scan and discover service metadata files within Github. For each of these discovered metadata files, the generators will create corresponding entities. This could mean generating an entity for a team if the metadata file is related to a specific team’s service, or it could mean creating an entity for a particular domain if the metadata file pertains to that.

In summary, these generators are crucial for automatic discovery and the generation of entities from service metadata. They form the backbone of how Backstage populates its service catalog and maintains an updated view of your services landscape. We will explore this process in more detail in the upcoming Backstage section.