You know it slightly jarring experience every time a well-known celebrity appears in a completely different context (e.g. a Musician making a cameo in a horror movie.; a NFL player raising his head in a comedy series; or a Hollywood movie icon selling mobile phone plans on TV? Well, it's starting to feel that way with Spotify's foray into the enterprise and developer tools space; There's nothing wrong with it in itself, but it does make you cringe a little because of its divergence from the norm.
What we are talking about is Behind the scenes, a platform and framework that Spotify introduced internally in 2016 to bring order to its developer 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? Behind the scenes 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 through an open source license to spur broader adoption. like Spotify did with Backstage in 2020. But it's highly unusual for a consumer technology company to actively monetize this side of its business, which Spotify has been doing since 2022.
Now, Spotify is leaning even further into this game with the launch of a new set of products and services designed to make Backstage the de facto developer portal platform for the software development industry.
Modular
Backstage is based on a modular, plugin-based architecture that allows engineers to layer their developer portal to meet their own needs. There is already a prosperous marketplace for Backstage pluginssome developed by Spotify itself and others by the broader community, including developers from Red Hat and amazon Web Services (AWS); AWS, for example, has developed a plugin to make data from amazon Elastic Container Service (amazon.com/ecs/”>ECS) available in Backstage.
Since late 2022, Spotify has been selling some premium plugins as a subscription, such as Behind the scenes information which provides data related to an organization's use of Backstage, including which plugins they interact with the most.
Behind the scenes information supplement 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 involved in setting up: lots of integrations, configurations, and figuring out how it all comes together.
Therefore, Spotify is now introducing a ready-to-use version of the open source project called Spotify Portal, available in beta as of today, which is presented as a “full-featured internal developer portal (IDP) with low or no code. ”built on top of Backstage.
Spotify Portal Image credits: Spotify
Spotify Portal ships with quick-start tools to connect all your internal services and libraries, complete with a setup wizard to install Portal and connect it to GitHub and an enterprise cloud provider.
“When you set up your IDP, you typically need to incorporate a lot of software, because the goal of the IDP is to capture your entire software catalog and map it to the user base, and there are potentially a lot of integrations involved,” Tyson Singer, explained to TechCrunch, director of technology and platforms at Spotify. “And so with Spotify Portal for Backstage, we've basically given people a no-code way to do that.”
Spotify Portal: Software Catalog Ingestion Image credits: Spotify
Get SaaS-y?
At first glance, this seems like some sort of SaaS game, similar to how a commercial company might offer a hosted, fully managed version of a popular open source product. But that's not exactly what's happening here: there's no hosted element in this, although that could change in the future. It's what Singer calls “Backstage in a box,” one that is deployed within the customer's own ecosystem, either on-premises or in their own cloud.
“It's the customer who manages it,” Singer said. “The important thing from our perspective is that we have really focused on reducing both startup time and maintenance time. That means not only is setup and onboarding “code-free,” but we're also reducing code on maintenance. “That actually makes it quite easy to manage in your own particular context.”
However, in a follow-up question, a Spotify spokesperson clarified that Spotify Portal for Backstage is their “first step toward a managed product,” meaning it will most likely be offered more as a SaaS service in the future. “We've seen a growing appetite for a more managed product that allows 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. “The portal is our first step on that journey, but in the future we will expand our offerings as we manage them.”
Additionally, Spotify is adding several services and business support to the mix, which it says it has already been providing since last summer but hasn't disclosed until now. This includes personalized technical support from dedicated Backstage staff at Spotify and includes service level agreements (SLAs), security reviews, and incident notifications. And for those who want to start using Backstage in the first instance, Spotify also offers consulting services.
winding
At its core, Spotify now serves three broad categories of users: the core open source project for those with the resources and technical skill to implement 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, which is where Spotify Portal comes into the picture.
Similar to the pricing structure of its existing add-on subscriptions, which are charged based on “individual customer parameters” such as usage and capacity, the new Portal and enterprise services do not include upfront costs. He
“For pricing, we refer customers to our sales organization,” Singer said. “It's a custom price.”
Given this transition to an enterprise-focused development tools company, Spotify also has to hire staff accordingly, although Singer did not share how many people it would hire or assign to these new support roles.
“We are changing the way we move forward with both our sales organization and our support,” Singer said. “So we're focusing more 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 realize 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 of development tools. The company is adding new features to some of its existing premium plugins and is also adding more 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; This includes built-in “ingers” to extract metadata from external data platforms and make it available in Backstage.
Last year, Spotify also introduced a completely separate product for software development teams called Trust, which is like an A/B experimentation platform based on its own internal tool. For now, it's still a beta product, but Singer says “all systems go” as he prepares things for prime time in the future.
“We're very happy with the feedback we've received from our (Confidence) beta customers so far,” Singer said. “We created an experimentation platform that is broad and deep, covering a huge number of use cases spanning everything from typical A/B testing on a user surface, to being able to do this in all of our ML (machine learning) uses. ). cases. And I think that really leaves it behind as more and more companies are using machine learning in the same way we are to optimize things.“
