Spotify generates the vast major part of its income from advertisements and subscriptions, but in recent years, the musical dissemination giant has also quietly developed a developer tools company. Backstage, a project it opened its doors in 2020, was adopted by more than 2 million developers in 3,400 organizations, including Airbnb, Linkedin, Twilio and American Airlines.
The backstage helps companies build personalized “internal developer portals” (IDP), by placing their infrastructure chaos by combining all their tools, applications, data, services, APIs and documents in a single interface.
Do you want to monitor Kubernetes, display cloud costs or check your CI / CD condition? Go behind the scenes.
The native Cloud Computing Foundation (CNCF), which accepted behind the scenes as an incubation project in 2022, reports that behind the scenes were one of its 5 best projects last year in terms of speed and activity. And it is this momentum that leads Spotify to double, with various premium tools and services on the horizon.
Baked
Companies can already use the Core backstage product for free, including a range of open source plugins that extend its features. But Spotify began to sell premium plugins in 2022, such as Backstage Insights, which displays data related to active backstage in an organization. And last year, Spotify became serious about its business game development tools, announcing Spotify Portal for behind the scenes in beta: a premium baked incarnation for those who do not have the resources (or inclination) to install everything. “Behind the scenes in a box,” is the general idea.
The fully managed SaaS product is now paid to general availability in the coming months, with design partners and customers, including the Linux Foundation and the duty to pager already on board.
“We discovered that there were a lot of profiles of different customers,” said Tyson Singer (photo above), the manager of SPOTIFY technology and platforms, told Techcrunch in an interview in Kubecon last month. “Our original theory was that behind the scenes were going to be more important for large companies for large companies with great complexity, but we have found that small businesses also see these same problems. And therefore having a hosted version makes it much easier.”
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Spotify has also teased a few new premium portal plugins in Kubecon, including AIKA (“AI Knowledge assistant”), which is essentially a chatbot initially developed internally for its own employees.
Result of a hackathon in 2023, Spotify says that AIKA is now used by 25% of its workforce each week to question the collective knowledge base of the company. Thus, rather than bombing support channels in Slack, employees can simply ask Aika, which is trained in its own documents and internal data.
Singer also says that the usefulness of AIKA – offering instant answers to questions – motivates employees to ensure that all their documents are up to date because it makes Aika smarter. If someone does not get a good answer to a question, it can see which source has been used in the answer and provide comments to ensure that the source document is improved.
“He [AiKA] A bit seems simple, but it’s powerful, and we had a very high adoption very quickly internally, “said Singer.”[I think why is because] It is not only the developers who use it – everyone in the R&D organization has entered, which also brings more people in the behind the scenes. But this also creates this very positive steering wheel between quality and discovery. »»
Spotify has confirmed that an alpha version of AIKA should be launched for third parties. And although it is not the parity of features with its own internal version initially, it should go somehow to strengthen the administration of backstage as a premium long -term product.
Growing confidence
The backstage is not the only product of local Spotify developer seeks to monetize. About 20 months ago, the company announced its confidence, an A / B experimentation platform which has remained in stealth since.
“We have some customers who pay [for Confidence]But we are really focusing on Portal right now, “said Singer.” We are very selective on the customers we let in. “”
According to Singer, Spotify will have more to say about confidence later this year, although it has referred to potential synergies between confidence and the portal in the form of a plugin which provides simple functionalities of ballot in the portal.
When everything is said and done, the creation of a tool developer at tools in addition to his day work as an online music emporium was certainly a major business. But there was a good reason for all of this. More than a decade ago, Spotify created its own container orchestration platform called Helios to support its transition to a microservice architecture. While Spotify finally opened Helios to stimulate wider absorption, he finally lost against Kubernetes de Google, who continued to conquer the world.
Spotify abandoned Helios and joined the crowd on Kubernetes – a “painful” decision at the time. And what we now see with behind the scenes is an answer to that: an effort to make sure that behind the scenes are the standard PDI of the industry, and that its own developers are not obliged to move on to something else that happens.
“When you have a product that is replaced by an external product, in particular an open source product, this migration cost is simply enormous,” said Singer. “And we have therefore decided that we do not want this to happen to a product that is literally the foundation of the way we make development at Spotify.”
While Spotify did a certain way to go through this problem when open behind the scenes in 2020, the premium stuff that follows now are really to make sure it sticks.
“We are a business – and we also want to create a healthy business in addition to all this,” said Singer. “We are not just trying to cover the costs. In the end, we have a lot of value trapped inside Spotify at the moment. ”
