You know that slightly uncomfortable experience every time a famous celebrity appears in a completely different context. For example, a musician who appears in a cameo in a horror movie. NFL players who are turning heads in comedy series. Or a Hollywood movie icon selling cell phone plans on TV? Well, it's starting to feel that way now that Spotify has moved into the enterprise and developer tools space. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but the deviation from the norm makes me wince a bit.
We're talking about Backstage, a platform and framework that Spotify brought internally in 2016 to bring order to its developer infrastructure. Backstage powers a customizable “developer portal” that combines tools, apps, data, services, APIs, and documentation into one interface. Want to monitor Kubernetes, check CI/CD status, or track security incidents? Come to the rescue behind the scenes.
Many companies build their own internal systems to increase developer efficiency. And many companies are making such systems available to the public through open source licenses to encourage broader adoption, as Spotify did with Backstage in 2020. But it's highly unusual for a consumer technology company to aggressively monetize this aspect of its business, and Spotify has done so in the past. I've been doing it since 2022.
Now, Spotify is leaning further into this effort with the launch of a new suite of products and services designed to make Backstage the de facto developer portal platform for the software development industry.
modular
Backstage is built on a modular, plugin-based architecture that allows engineers to layer the developer portal to suit their needs. There is already a thriving market for Backstage plugins, with some developed by Spotify itself and others by the broader community, including developers at Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS). For example, AWS has developed a plugin that creates data from Amazon Elastic Containers. Services available backstage (ECS).
Since late 2022, Spotify has sold several premium plugins as subscriptions. For example, Backstage Insights provides data related to Backstage usage across your organization, including which plugins you use the most.
Backstage Insights Plugin Image Credit: Spotify
The open source Backstage project has been adopted internally by more than 3,000 organizations and some of the world's most famous companies, including LinkedIn, Twilio, American Airlines, Unity, Splunk, Ikea, and HP. However, like any open source project, the main problem with Backstage is the complexity involved in setting it up. It requires a lot of integration, configuration, and understanding how to tie it all together.
That's why Spotify is now introducing a ready-to-use version of an open source project called Spotify Portal, which will be available in beta starting today. It's advertised as a “full-featured, little-to-no-code in-house developer portal (IDP).” ” It was built on top of backstage.
Spotify portal image credit: Spotify
Spotify Portal ships with quickstart tools to connect all internal services and libraries, and is packed with setup wizards to install Portal and connect it to your company's GitHub and cloud providers.
“When you set up an IDP, you typically need to get a lot of software into it. The purpose of an IDP is to capture and map a complete software catalog to your user base, and there are potentially many integrations involved. ,” Tyson Singer, head of technology and platforms at Spotify, explained to TechCrunch. “So with Spotify Portal for Backstage, we basically gave people a way to do that without any code.”
Spotify Portal: Software Catalog Ingest Image Credit: Spotify
Will it look like SaaS?
On the surface, this looks like some kind of SaaS play, similar to how commercial companies offer fully managed and hosted versions of popular open source products. But that's not quite what's happening here. This has no hosted elements, but that may change in the future. This is what Singer calls “backstage in a box” and is deployed within the customer's own ecosystem, either on-premises or in their own cloud.
“The customer is in control of that,” Singer said. “What's important from our perspective is that we're focused on reducing both startup and maintenance times. This means that not only is setup and onboarding 'no code', but maintenance But the code will be reduced. This makes it very easy to manage in your own specific context. ”
However, in a subsequent question, a Spotify spokesperson said that Spotify Portal for Backstage is the company's “first step toward a managed product” and that it will likely be offered more like a SaaS service in the future. I made it clear that I meant it. “We're seeing a growing demand for more controlled products that allow us to share our expertise more directly with businesses. We want to be able to offer more products to support that need. We believe that,” the spokesperson said. “Portal is the first step in that journey, but in the future we plan to expand our services as a managed service.”
Additionally, Spotify is adding a variety of enterprise support and services that it said it already had available last summer but didn't reveal until now. This includes his one-on-one technical support from Spotify's dedicated backstage personnel, including service level agreements (SLAs), security reviews, and incident notifications. And for those who want to start using his Backstage for the first time, Spotify also offers consulting services.
Winding up
Essentially, Spotify currently caters to three broad categories of users. One is a core open source project for users who have the resources and technical knowledge to self-deploy everything. “Hybrid adopters,” as Spotify calls them, are people who have some of the necessary skills but need help along the way. And some businesses need something a little more oven-baked. That's where Spotify Portal comes in.
Similar to the existing plug-in subscription pricing structure, which is charged based on “individual customer parameters” such as usage and capacity, the new Portal and Enterprise services have no upfront costs.that
“For pricing, we refer customers to our sales organization,” Singer said. “It's a custom price.”
Given its transition to an enterprise-focused developer tools company, Spotify will also need to increase its headcount accordingly, although Singer declined to say how many people it will hire or assign to these new support roles. .
“We're changing the way we operate both in our sales organization and support,” Singer said. “So we're shifting our focus more to how we can support our customers' initial efforts and how we can support their ongoing efforts once they're set up. Because we want to be able to help our customers get value as quickly as possible.'' “
All of this appears to be just the tip of the iceberg as far as shifts in Spotify's developer tools are concerned. The company has added new features to some of its existing premium plugins and is adding more plugins as well. One of these is the “Data Experience” plugin, which allows you to easily add individual data entities to your software catalog. This includes a built-in “ingester” that retrieves metadata from external data platforms and makes it available throughout Backstage.
Last year, Spotify also rolled out a completely different product for software development teams called Confidence. This is like his A/B experimentation platform based on one of his own internal tools. For now, it remains a beta product, but Singer says “all systems go live” as it prepares for prime time in the future.
“We are very pleased with the feedback we have received so far. [Confidence] We are a beta customer so far,” Singer said. “We've built a breadth and depth of experimentation platform that covers a huge amount of use cases, covering everything from typical A/B testing on the user surface to things you can run across all ML. . [machine learning] Example of use. And I don't think this really matters because more and more companies are using ML in the same way that we optimize things. ”