Backstage AWS SAM RDS Template

This repository is a Backstage scaffolding template for creating a new repo for deploying an AWS RDS database using AWS SAM and GitHub Actions.

What this template creates

When used from Backstage, the template generates a new project that includes:

• An AWS SAM template defining an Aurora PostgreSQL cluster
• A Secrets Manager secret for the database admin password
• VPC/subnet and security group configuration for the database
• SSM parameters for cluster host, port, username, and admin credentials
• GitHub Actions workflows for validation and deployment
• A generated repository skeleton ready to be published to GitHub and registered back into Backstage

Template structure

• template.yaml — the Backstage Scaffolder template definition
• skeleton/ — the generated project skeleton used by the template
• pipeline/ — GitHub Actions workflow templates added to the generated repository

Included infrastructure

The generated SAM stack provisions:

• Aurora PostgreSQL database cluster
• DB instances with serverless v2 scaling
• DB subnet group and security group
• Secret in AWS Secrets Manager
• CloudWatch log exports for Postgres logs
• SSM configuration values for runtime integration

This is useful when a service needs a managed database but you want the environment to be created consistently and repeatably from a Backstage-driven workflow.

How it works

The scaffold collects basic metadata from Backstage, including:

• component name and description
• owner and domain/system context
• deployment account and environment metadata
• database settings like engine, version, username, port, and scaling capacity

It then:

1. fetches the relevant catalog entities from Backstage
2. renders the project skeleton from skeleton/
3. adds CI/CD workflow files from pipeline/
4. publishes the repo to GitHub
5. registers the new component in Backstage

Requirements

Before using this template in a Backstage installation, ensure the following are available:

• Backstage with the Scaffolder plugin enabled
• GitHub publisher integration configured for repository creation
• Catalog entities for domain, system, owner, environment, and cloud account
• AWS account and VPC/subnet configuration for the target deployment environment
• AWS SAM and related deployment tooling available in the generated project pipeline

Notes

This template focuses specifically on a PostgreSQL-backed RDS deployment flow and is best suited for infrastructure teams standardizing database provisioning through Backstage.