You know slightly shocking experience every time a well-known celebrity appears in a totally different context – for example a musician making an appearance in a horror film; an NFL player who raises his head in a comedy series; or a Hollywood movie icon selling cell phone plans on television? Well, it’s starting to look like that with Spotify’s foray into the enterprise and developer tools space – nothing wrong with that in itself, but it does make you wince a little due to its departure from to the standard.
We’re talking about Backstage, a platform and framework that Spotify introduced internally in 2016 to bring order to its development infrastructure. Backstage powers customizable “developer portals” that combine tools, applications, data, services, APIs, and documents into a single interface. Do you want to monitor Kubernetes, check the status of your CI/CD or track security incidents? Backstage to the rescue.
Many companies build their own internal systems to help developers work more efficiently. And many companies release such systems to the public via an open source license to drive wider adoption, as Spotify did with Backstage in 2020. But it’s highly unusual for a consumer tech company to actively monetize this aspect of its business, what Spotify did. do since 2022.
Now, Spotify is getting even bigger into this game 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 their development portal to meet their own needs. There is already a thriving market for Backstage plugins, some developed by Spotify itself and others by the broader community, including developers at Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS, for example, has developed a plugin to generate data from Amazon Elastic Container. Service (ECS) available in Backstage.
As of late 2022, Spotify sells a handful of premium plugins as a subscription, such as Backstage Insights, which provides data related to Backstage usage within an organization, including which plugins they interact with the most .
Backstage Insights Plugin Image credits:Spotify
The open source Backstage project has been adopted internally by some of the world’s best-known companies, including LinkedIn, Twilio, American Airlines, Unity, Splunk, Ikea, HP, and more than 3,000 organizations. But as with almost any open source project, the main problem with Backstage is the complexity of the setup: lots of integrations, configurations, and how it all fits together.
So, Spotify now presents a ready-to-use version of the open source project called Spotify Portal, available in beta from today, which is presented as a “complete internal development portal (IDP), with few code or without code. » built at the top of the scenes.
Spotify Portal Image credits:Spotify
Spotify Portal comes with quick-start tools for connecting all of their internal services and libraries, as well as a setup wizard for installing the portal and connecting it to a company’s GitHub and cloud provider.
“When you set up your IDP, you typically have to ingest a lot of software into it, because the purpose of the IDP is to capture your entire software catalog and map it to the user base, and there is potentially “There’s a lot of integrations involved in that,” Tyson Singer, Spotify’s head of technology and platforms, explained to TechCrunch. “And so with Spotify Portal for Backstage, we’ve basically given people a no-code way to do that. .”
Spotify Portal: Ingesting the Software Catalog Image credits:Spotify
Are you opting for SaaS?
On the surface, this looks like some sort of SaaS play, similar to how a commercial company might offer a hosted, fully managed version of a popular open source product. But that’s not quite what’s happening here: there are no hosted items, although that might change in the future. This is what Singer calls “Backstage in a box”, which is deployed within the customer’s own ecosystem, either on-premises or in their own cloud.
“The customer is in charge,” Singer said. “What’s important from our perspective is that we’ve really focused on reducing startup time and maintenance time. So this means that not only is the configuration and integration “no code”, but also the maintenance where we reduce the code. This really makes it very manageable in your own particular context.
However, in a follow-up question, a Spotify spokesperson clarified that Spotify’s portal for Backstage is its “first step toward a managed product,” meaning it will most likely be offered more as a SaaS service at home. future. “We’ve seen a growing appetite for a better-managed product that would allow us to share our expertise more directly with businesses, and we want to be able to offer more to meet that need,” the spokesperson said. “Portal is our first step in this journey, but in the future we will expand our offerings through management. »
In addition, Spotify is adding various enterprise supports and services to its offering, which it already claims to provide since last summer, but has not disclosed until now. This includes one-on-one technical support from Spotify’s dedicated Backstage staff, as well as service level agreements (SLAs), security reviews, and incident notifications. And for those who want to get started with Backstage first, Spotify also offers consulting services.
Queuing
Essentially, Spotify now caters to three broad categories of users: the core open source project for those with the resources and technical acumen to deploy everything themselves; “hybrid adopters,” which is what Spotify calls those who have some of the necessary skills but need some support along the way; and then there are businesses that need something a little more baked in – that’s where Spotify Portal enters the fray.
Similar to the pricing structure of its existing plugin subscriptions, which are billed based on “individual customer parameters” such as usage and capacity, the new portal and enterprise services do not incur any upfront costs. He
“For pricing, we refer customers to our sales organization,” Singer said. “It’s personalized pricing.”
Given this transition to an enterprise-focused developer tools company, Spotify also needs to increase its headcount accordingly, although Singer would not disclose how many people it would hire or allocate to these new support roles .
“We’re changing the way we move forward, both in terms of our business organization and support,” Singer said. “So we’re more focused on how we can support customers in their initial journey and then also, once they’ve set it up, in their ongoing journey, because we want to be able to help them generate the value as quickly as possible. as possible. »
All of this, it seems, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Spotify’s change in developer tools. The company is adding new features to some of its existing premium plugins, and is also adding other plugins to the mix. One of them is the “data experience” plugin, which makes it easy to add individual data entities to a software catalog – it includes built-in “ingesters” to retrieve metadata from external data platforms and make them available in Backstage.
Last year, Spotify also launched a completely separate product aimed at software development teams, called Confidence, which is akin to an A/B experimentation platform based on one of its own internal tools. For now, it remains a beta product, but Singer says “all systems are working” as he prepares things for prime time in the future.
“We are very pleased with the feedback we have received so far from our beta (Trust) customers,” Singer said. “We’ve built a broad and deep experimentation platform, covering a huge number of use cases, from your typical A/B testing on one user surface to being able to do this across all of our uses of ML (machine learning). case. And I think that really puts it aside because more and more companies are using ML in the same way that we do to optimize things.“
techcrunch
