Spotify Expands Enterprise and Developer Tools with Backstage Platform

Spotify’s Unexpected Venture into Developer Tools with Backstage

Picture this: you’re watching a movie and suddenly, a well-known pop star appears in a cameo role as a zombie slayer. Or you’re browsing through a tech magazine and stumble upon an article about a legendary actor now selling smartphones. These unexpected crossovers can be a bit jarring, right? Well, that’s kind of how it feels to see Spotify, the music streaming giant, making moves in the enterprise software and developer tools space.

Introducing Backstage: Spotify’s Internal Developer Portal

In 2016, Spotify created an internal platform called Backstage to streamline their developer infrastructure. Backstage enables the creation of customizable “developer portals” that integrate various tools, apps, data, services, APIs, and documentation into a unified interface. Whether you need to monitor Kubernetes clusters, check the status of your CI/CD pipelines, or keep track of security incidents, Backstage has you covered.

From Internal Tool to Open Source Project

Many companies develop their own internal systems to boost developer productivity, and some even release these tools to the public as open source projects. In 2020, Spotify followed this trend by open-sourcing Backstage. However, it’s quite unusual for a consumer-focused tech company to actively monetize their internal tools, but that’s exactly what Spotify has been doing since 2022.

Doubling Down on Developer Tools

Now, Spotify is taking their commitment to the developer tools space even further by launching a new suite of products and services aimed at making Backstage the go-to developer portal platform for the software development industry.

The Power of Modularity: Backstage’s Plug-in Architecture

One of the key strengths of Backstage is its modular, plug-in based architecture, which allows engineers to customize their developer portal to suit their specific needs. The Backstage plug-in marketplace is already thriving, with contributions from Spotify, the wider open source community, and even developers from companies like Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS). For example, AWS has created a plug-in that integrates data from Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) into Backstage.

Premium Plug-ins: Spotify’s Monetization Strategy

Since late 2022, Spotify has been offering a selection of premium plug-ins as part of a subscription model. One such plug-in is Backstage Insights, which provides data on how an organization is using Backstage, including which plug-ins are most popular among their developers.

Backstage Insights plug-in. Image Credits: Spotify

The open source Backstage project has already gained significant traction, with hundreds of companies, including tech giants like Netflix, American Airlines, and Epic Games, adopting the platform. As Spotify continues to invest in and expand the capabilities of Backstage, it’s clear that they’re serious about establishing themselves as a major player in the developer tools space.

Spotify Unveils Spotify Portal: A No-Code Internal Developer Portal Built on Backstage

Spotify, the company behind the popular open source project Backstage, which has been adopted by over 3,000 organizations including industry giants like LinkedIn, Twilio, American Airlines, Unity, Splunk, Ikea, and HP, is now introducing Spotify Portal. This out-of-the-box version of Backstage aims to simplify the complex setup process associated with the open source project.

Streamlining the Setup Process

Spotify Portal, currently in beta, is designed to be a full-featured, low-/no-code internal developer portal (IDP) built on top of Backstage. It comes equipped with quick-start tools for connecting internal services and libraries, as well as a setup wizard for installing Portal and integrating it with a company’s GitHub and cloud provider.

Tyson Singer, Spotify’s head of technology and platforms, explained the benefits of Spotify Portal:

“When you set up your IDP, typically you need to ingest a lot of software into that, because the point of the IDP is to capture your full software catalogue and map that to the user base, and there’s potentially a lot of integrations involved in. And so with Spotify Portal for Backstage, we’ve basically given folks a no-code way to do that.”

The Future of Spotify Portal

While Spotify Portal is currently deployed within the customer’s own ecosystem, either on-premises or in their own cloud, Spotify has hinted at plans to offer it as a more managed product in the future. The company has seen a growing demand for a managed product that would allow them to share their expertise more directly with companies.

Enterprise Support and Services

In addition to Spotify Portal, Spotify is now offering various enterprise support and services, including one-on-one tech support from dedicated Backstage personnel, service-level agreements (SLAs), security reviews, and incident notifications. For those looking to get started with Backstage, Spotify also provides consulting services.

Catering to Different User Categories

Spotify is now catering to three main categories of users:

• Core open source project users with the resources and technical skills to self-deploy everything
• Hybrid adopters who have some necessary skills but need support along the way
• Businesses that require a more oven-baked solution, which is where Spotify Portal comes in

Expanding Developer Tooling

Spotify is also adding new features to its existing premium plug-ins and introducing new ones, such as the “data experience” plug-in, which simplifies the process of adding individual data entities to a software catalog. The company is also preparing to launch Confidence, an A/B experimentation platform based on one of its own internal tools, which is currently in beta.

“We are super happy with the feedback that we’ve been getting from our [Confidence] beta customers so far. We built out an experimentation platform that is broad and deep, covering a tremendous amount of use cases covering everything from your typical A/B testing on a user surface, to being able to do that across all of our ML [machine learning] use cases. And I think that really sets it aside, as more and more companies are using ML in the same sorts of ways that we are to optimize things.”

As Spotify continues to expand its developer tooling offerings, it is clear that the company is committed to supporting software development teams in their journey to create better products and services.