Finding which team owns a service shouldn't require a Slack archaeology dig, three stale wiki pages, and a guess. Portico turns your sprawl of repos, dashboards, and half-remembered context into one catalog with a search box — plus golden paths that scaffold a production-ready service in the time it takes to write the ticket for it.
Reads the stack your platform team already runs
A portal is only worth opening if it answers the questions engineers actually ask at 2pm and 2am. Portico is built around four of them — what exists, who owns it, how do I make a new one, and is it healthy. Everything else is in service of those.
Portico discovers services from your repos, clusters, and cloud accounts, then keeps each entry alive from a catalog-info file that lives next to the code. Ownership, on-call, dependencies, and docs are read from the source of truth — so the entry updates on every merge instead of drifting like the wiki page everyone stopped trusting. Search by team, tier, language, or 'who do I page when this breaks' and get one answer, not nine tabs.
A golden path is your platform team's blessed way to create a thing — a service, a cron job, a frontend, a data pipeline. Fill in three fields and Portico scaffolds the repo, wires CI, registers the catalog entry, opens the on-call rotation, and ships a hello-world to staging. The right way becomes the easy way, and the easy way becomes the only way anyone bothers to copy.
Define what 'production-ready' means once — has an owner, has a runbook, scans clean, holds its SLOs — and Portico grades every service against it automatically. Teams see a number and the three things that would raise it, not a 40-row audit spreadsheet nobody opens twice. The end-of-quarter migration manhunt becomes a filter and a deadline.
TechDocs-style pages build from Markdown in each repo and render inside the portal, versioned with the code they describe. The README your engineers already keep becomes the docs site they always wished they had — no separate CMS, no page that drifts a release behind reality.
Surface the latest CI run, the current deploy, open incidents, monthly cloud cost, and security findings on a service's own page — pulled live from Datadog, Argo, PagerDuty, and Snyk. One pane instead of nine logins, and a typed plugin API to add the tenth integration in an afternoon.
What changes once the front door exists
Writing a new service was never the slow part — the forty steps around it were, the ones everyone half-remembers and copy-pastes wrong. Portico turns those steps into a form your platform team owns, so a day-one hire and a ten-year veteran ship the same correct shape.
Choose from the templates your platform team published — Go microservice, Next.js app, scheduled job, dbt pipeline. Each one encodes your standards, not a generic starter, so the result already matches house style.
Name it, pick the owning squad, choose the tier. Portico fills in the rest from your conventions — repo location, CI config, base image, lint rules, secret scopes — so there's nothing to paste in from a neighbouring repo.
It creates the repo, commits the scaffold, opens the CI pipeline, registers the catalog entry, sets the on-call rotation, and provisions the staging namespace — one click, fully auditable, no tickets to three other teams.
The first pipeline goes green and a hello-world lands on a live staging URL, already in the catalog with a starting scorecard. The engineer opens their editor to the feature, not the plumbing.
Each path is code, not a wizard hardcoded by us. Edit one file and every future service inherits the change. Here are the ones teams stand up first.
gRPC + HTTP, structured logging, OpenTelemetry, Dockerfile, and a CI matrix wired to your registry. Ships with health checks and a Tier-default SLO.
App Router, design-system preset, preview deploys, and analytics already keyed. Lands on a staging URL with auth stubbed to your IdP.
Cron-driven worker with retry, dead-letter handling, and alerting pre-routed to the owning squad's PagerDuty rotation.
Sources, staging models, tests, and docs scaffolded to your warehouse conventions, registered in the catalog as a data product with lineage.
OpenAPI spec, generated typed client, contract tests, and a published docs page — so consumers integrate without reading your source.
Author a path from any repo with a few template files and a manifest. If your team can write a starter, Portico can make it the default.
“Onboarding used to mean two weeks of 'go ask someone where things live.' New hires now ship a real service on day three, because the golden path makes the right shape the default. Our platform team went from gatekeepers to publishers.”
“Four hundred services and no honest answer to 'who owns this one.' Portico read our clusters, we backfilled catalog files in a sprint, and now every Tier-1 has an owner, a runbook, and a scorecard. Incident response stopped opening with a manhunt.”
“We tried to stand up Backstage twice and drowned in plugin glue and Node upgrades. Portico gave us the catalog and golden paths working in a week, and the plugin API was typed well enough that our own integration took an afternoon, not a quarter.”
You shouldn't pay more for being well-organized. Portico is priced on the engineers who use it — unlimited services, golden paths, and plugins on every plan.
For small teams putting up the front door.
For scaling orgs standardizing how they ship.
For regulated and self-hosted estates.
No. Portico is built on the same ideas the industry standardized around — a catalog, golden paths, TechDocs, scorecards — but delivered as a product you configure instead of a framework you maintain. There's no plugin monorepo to babysit and no Node upgrade treadmill. If you already run Backstage, we import your catalog-info entries, so you keep the work and drop the upkeep.
It discovers them automatically from your GitHub or GitLab orgs, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud accounts, then keeps each entry accurate from a catalog-info file committed next to the code. The source of truth stays in your repos, so the catalog updates itself on every merge instead of drifting like a wiki.
Yes. Enterprise runs entirely inside your own VPC or on-prem, with no service data leaving your network. The cloud version is fully managed if you'd rather not run it yourself, and you can move between them without re-cataloging a thing.
Most teams have a searchable catalog within a day of connecting their repos, and a first golden path published within the week. You don't need every service catalogued to get value — start with Tier-1, and let discovery and scorecards pull the rest in over time.
They encode your way, not ours. Templates are authored as code by your platform team and versioned in a repo you own, so you can run ten paths or one, change them whenever, and roll an update out to every future service by editing a single file. Nothing is hardcoded by Portico.
Access maps to your identity provider via SSO, with role-based controls over who can view the catalog, run a golden path, or edit a scorecard. Enterprise adds SCIM provisioning and full audit logs, so every scaffold and change is attributable to a person.
Connect one repo and watch your services populate the catalog in minutes. No rip-and-replace, no migration committee — just the map your platform should have had on day one.