Backbone

Enterprise foundations. Startup speed.

Backbone is an opinionated production platform for building SaaS on AWS.

It gives a small team the operational foundations that normally take months or years to build — identity, security, audit, infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, resilience, data services, and governance — so you launch earlier and spend runway on product, not undifferentiated infrastructure.

Build your product. We already built the platform under it.

Website · Docs · Features

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Why Backbone?

Year 3 platform maturity on Day 1.

Backbone collapses the work of building a production foundation:

• Ship earlier — build domain services from day one, and skip months of software foundations and platform engineering
• Protect runway — avoid a comparable in-house platform build; keep senior engineers focused on your product domain and services
• Proven scale — published ECS/Fargate load results support hundreds of concurrent users/requests with no evident ceiling (benchmarks)
• Enterprise-grade security — Cognito, service auth, least-privilege IAM, OIDC deployment identity, WAF, private networking, encryption (security)
• Comprehensive compliance footing — audit trails, control mapping, and shared-responsibility evidence for SOC 2 / GDPR / HIPAA-aligned objectives (compliance)
• De-risk due diligence — architecture, infrastructure, and controls already exist, documented and inspectable
• Massive engineering leverage — years of platform engineering, already built and integrated

Not a framework. Not a hosted PaaS.

Your AWS. Your GitHub. Your code. Your data.

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Community: build the product first

Community is the free local development gateway to Backbone.

It gives you the scaffolding and golden path to build your own domain services on top of the Backbone platform.

The Community edition deliberately doesn't open-source the production platform itself; you are unable to extend core features (such as auth) or deploy it to production until licenced.

Includes

• Local Floci / Postgres / Redis
• Pre-built native platform services — auth, actor, notification, document
• BFF + stateless reference UI in Quarkus dev mode
• scaffold and run domain services immediately with auth, throttling, logging, and metrics all baked-in
• Open SDK surface and development tooling

Does not include

• Backbone core service or library source
• AWS deployment, CDK/IaC, or production infrastructure
• Full production CI/CD workflows
• Production observability, governance, and scaling
• Commercial licence entitlements

Community's core runtime is distributed as protected native images, not source code.

Audit is a production platform capability and is not included in Community.

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Upgrade when you need the cloud

The path is deliberately simple:

1. Build locally and develop your domain services on Community
2. Prove the product – your domain code is built against the Backbone platform
3. Licence and deploy to your AWS account when you're ready
4. Choose the commercial tier you need — Foundation, Growth, or Enterprise progressively unlock production capabilities

Your domain code carries forward. You don't rebuild the platform when you go to production.

Features · Pricing

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Quick Start

Approx. 10 minutes.

1. Bootstrap

brew install go-task
task bootstrap:toolchain
task bootstrap:mvn
task lefthook:install
task bootstrap:licence-install
task bootstrap:licence-secure
task bootstrap:dotenvrc

2. Start the local platform

task docker:start -- floci-ce postgres-ce redis-ce jaeger-ce
task dev:floci
task seed:floci
mert start

3. Scaffold a domain service

task dev:scaffold -- quote-engine
# optional RDS:
task dev:scaffold -- search-service --with-rds

You're building product, not platform.

Development guide · Cheatsheet · Runbook

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Backbone — Enterprise foundations. Startup speed.

Community licence — see LICENCE_COMMUNITY.md.