Spotify is Serious About Its Business and Development Tools Business | TechCrunch

You know that a slightly jarring experience when this well-known celebrity appears in a completely different context – e.g. B. as a musician who makes a cameo in a horror film; an NFL player rearing his head in a comedy series; Or a Hollywood film icon selling cell phone plans on television? Well, with Spotify’s foray into enterprise and developer tools, it’s starting to feel that way – there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it makes you cringe a little because it’s a departure from the norm.

We’re talking about Backstage, a platform and framework that Spotify introduced internally in 2016 to bring order to its developer infrastructure. Backstage enables customizable “developer portals” that combine tools, apps, data, services, APIs and documents into a single interface. Do you want to monitor Kubernetes, check your CI/CD status, or track security incidents? Backstage to the rescue.

Many companies build their own internal systems to help developers work more efficiently. And many companies are releasing such systems to the public via an open source license to encourage wider adoption, as Spotify did with Backstage in 2020. But it’s highly unusual for a consumer technology company to actively monetize this part of its business, as Spotify has been doing since 2022.

Now Spotify is getting even deeper into this game with the launch of a new range 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, plug-in-based architecture that allows engineers to layer their developer portal based on their own needs. There is already a thriving marketplace for Backstage plugins, some developed by Spotify itself and others by the wider community, including developers from Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – AWS, for example, developed a plugin to retrieve data from Amazon Elastic Container to create service (ECS) available in backstage.

Since late 2022, Spotify has been selling a handful of premium plugins by subscription, such as Backstage Insights, which provides data on Backstage usage across the company, including the plugins they interact with most often.

The open source Backstage project has been adopted internally by some of the world’s most prominent companies, including LinkedIn, Twilio, American Airlines, Unity, Splunk, Ikea, HP and more than 3,000 organizations. But like almost every open source project, the main problem with Backstage is the complexity of setting it up – lots of integrations, configurations, and figuring out how everything fits together.

As such, Spotify is now introducing an out-the-box version of the open source project called Spotify Portal, available in beta starting today, which it describes as a “full-featured, low-code/no-code internal developer portal (IDP). becomes. “built on backstage.

Spotify Portal comes with quick-start tools for connecting all internal services and libraries, as well as a setup wizard for installing the portal and connecting to a company’s GitHub and cloud provider.

“When you set up your IDP, you typically have to integrate a lot of software into it, because the point of the IDP is to capture your entire software catalog and map it to the user base, and there may be a lot of integrations associated with it,” explained Tyson Singer, head of technology and platforms at Spotify, told TechCrunch. “And so with Spotify Portal for Backstage, we basically gave people a way to do this without code.”

Getting SaaS-y?

On the surface, this seems like a SaaS play of sorts, similar to how a commercial company might offer a fully managed, hosted version of a popular open source product. But that’s not quite what’s happening here – there’s no hosted element, although that could change in the future. Singer calls it “backstage in a box,” a system deployed within the customer’s own ecosystem either on-premises or in their own cloud.

“It’s the customer who manages it,” Singer said. “What’s important from our perspective is that we’ve really focused on reducing both ramp-up time and maintenance time. So this means that not only is the setup and onboarding done without code, but also the maintenance where we reduce the code. This makes it really easy to manage in your own context.”

However, in a follow-up question, a Spotify spokesperson clarified that Spotify’s Backstage portal is its “first step toward a managed product,” meaning it will most likely be offered more like a SaaS service in the future. “We have seen growing interest in a better managed product that would allow us to share our expertise more directly with companies, and we want to be able to offer more to support this need,” the spokesperson said. “Portal is our first step on this path, but in the future we will expand our offering as planned.”

Additionally, Spotify is adding various business support and services to the mix, which it says it has been offering since last summer but has not yet announced. This includes one-on-one technical support from dedicated Spotify backstage staff, as well as service level agreements (SLAs), security audits and incident notifications. And for anyone who would like to get acquainted with Backstage, Spotify also offers consulting services.

Rewind

Essentially, Spotify now targets three broad categories of users: the core open source project for those who have the resources and technical acumen to provide everything themselves; the “hybrid adopters,” as Spotify calls those who have some of the necessary skills but need some support along the way; And then there are the companies that need something a little more oven-baked – and that’s where the Spotify portal comes into play.

Similar to the pricing structure for the existing plugin subscriptions, whose billing is based on “individual customer parameters” such as usage and capacity, the new portal and enterprise services have no upfront costs. It

“We refer customers to our sales organization for pricing,” Singer said. “It’s individual pricing.”

Given this transition to an enterprise-focused developer tools company, Spotify will also need to add staff accordingly, although Singer wouldn’t say how many people it would hire or assign to new support roles.

“We are changing the way we drive both our sales organization and our support,” Singer said. “That’s why we’re focusing more on how we can support customers on their initial journey, and then once they’ve set it up, on their further journey, because we want to help them add value as quickly as possible .”

All of this seems to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Spotify’s developer tools shift. The company is adding new features to some of its existing premium plugins and is also adding more plugins to the mix. One of these is the Data Experience plugin, which makes it easier to add individual data entities to a software catalog – this includes built-in ingestors to capture metadata from external data platforms and make it available in Backstage.

Last year, Spotify also introduced an entirely separate product for software development teams called Confidence, which is similar to an A/B experimentation platform based on one of its own internal tools. It’s still a beta product at the moment, but Singer says it’s “all systems go” as it prepares for future prime time.

“We are very happy with the feedback we have received [Confidence] “We don’t have any beta customers yet,” Singer said. “We have developed an experimentation platform that is broad and deep and covers a tremendous number of use cases, covering everything from typical A/B testing on one UI to the ability to do this for all of our ML applications [machine learning] Use cases. And I think that’s a real difference because more and more companies are using ML in the same way we do to optimize things.“