Certified Backstage Associate (CBA)
The only certification for the developer portal most internal platforms are built on — weighted toward customising Backstage in TypeScript and React rather than installing it, with a third of the marks on plugins.
- src
- Linux Foundation Training & Certification — Certified Backstage Associate (CBA) certification page (training.linuxfoundation.org)
- chk
Backstage is the front door of most internal developer platforms, and almost everyone who runs one learned it by copying somebody's Helm chart. The CBA is the first exam that checks whether you understand the framework underneath.
Where the marks actually are
The heaviest domain is Customizing Backstage at 32% — frontend versus backend plugins, editing React code, Material UI components. Add the 24% development workflow domain, which is TypeScript compilation, dependency management and building a container image, and 56% of the exam is software development.
The Backstage Catalog, which is what most people think Backstage is, is 22%. Infrastructure and deployment is the other 22%.
That distribution catches people out. The mental model "Backstage is a service catalogue" describes barely a fifth of the marks. The exam's model is "Backstage is a TypeScript framework you fork and extend", which is also the accurate one — it is the thing that makes Backstage different from a wiki with a search box.
Who it is actually for
Portal maintainers, not portal users. If your week includes writing a plugin, debugging why an entity did not appear after a repository was registered, or upgrading a Backstage fork that has drifted from upstream, this exam is a close map of the job.
If your week includes filling in catalog-info.yaml files, it is not. That is the 22% domain, and $250 is a lot for a quarter of an exam.
The prerequisite nobody states
There are no formal prerequisites, and there is a real one: React and TypeScript. The blueprint says it plainly — compile a project with TypeScript, make changes to React code in the Backstage app, use Material UI components — and no amount of Kubernetes experience substitutes.
This is worth saying because Backstage is usually adopted by platform teams, and platform teams are usually stronger in Go and YAML than in frontend JavaScript. The CBA is the rare cloud native certification where the frontend engineer on the team has the advantage.
Before you book
Scaffold your own app and keep it. Not a demo instance — a repository you created, compiled and containerised yourself. Every domain except the catalog is examined against that experience.
Write both kinds of plugin. Frontend and backend are named as separate competencies, and the distinction between them is the single most likely thing to be asked about in the heaviest domain.
75% is the bar, applied across the Linux Foundation's multiple-choice exams rather than published per exam. Two years' validity, renewed by sitting the exam again.
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Exam domains
Customizing Backstage
32%Backstage Development Workflow
24%Backstage Infrastructure
22%Backstage Catalog
22%Preparation path
- 1
Create an app and run it locally before reading anything else
Backstage is a framework you scaffold, not a product you install, and the exam's largest domains assume you have felt that difference. Create an app, run it, and break the build once. Everything later makes sense only against a codebase you own.
~6 hours - 2
Write a plugin, frontend and backend — this is 32% of the exam
The heaviest domain is customisation, and it is the one you cannot fake. Build a frontend plugin, then a backend one, and edit the React code rather than copying a template. Material UI components are named explicitly in the blueprint.
~28 hours - 3
Populate the catalog three different ways, then break the ingestion
Manual entity locations, automated discovery and annotations are three separate competencies, and troubleshooting ingestion is a fourth. Register a repository, watch an entity fail to appear, and find out why — that failure is the examinable skill.
~14 hours - 4
Configure it properly and deploy it somewhere real
App config, the client-server split and a production deployment are 22% between them. Build the container image yourself and run it outside your laptop: the blueprint asks about deploying Backstage to production, not about yarn dev.
~12 hours - 5
Add software templates, because that is what people use it for
Templates are not a named domain, but they are the reason organisations adopt Backstage and they exercise the catalog and plugin knowledge the exam does test. Scaffolding a new service from a golden path ties the other four steps together.
~8 hours
Frequently asked questions
Career Roadmaps
- Platform Engineer RoadmapThe path DevOps engineers move into — building an internal developer platform as a product, covering Kubernetes as substrate, IaC at scale, GitOps, golden paths, portals, policy, multi-tenancy and adoption.
- DevOps Engineer RoadmapA structured path from Linux fundamentals through cloud infrastructure, automation, containers, and monitoring to a production-ready DevOps engineering career.