Spotify gets serious about business strategy for enterprise and development tools

you know that Every time that famous celebrity appears in a completely different context, it’s a mildly jarring experience. Musicians who make cameo appearances in horror movies; of NFL player with head raised in a comedy series.or Hollywood movie icon sells 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.

what we are talking about backstageis a platform and framework that Spotify brought in-house 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. Just like 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 been doing so 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.It’s already thriving Backstage plugin marketplacesome developed by Spotify itself, and others by the broader community, including developers at Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS) (e.g., AWS). Developed a plugin Create data from Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Available at Backstage.

Starting in late 2022, Spotify sells several premium plugins as a subscription. behind the scenes insights This provides data related to Backstage usage across your organization, such as which plugins are used the most.

Open source Backstage project Hired within the company Powered by over 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 credits: 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: Ingest Software Catalog image credits: 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 is also adding new features to some of its existing premium plugins, including the “Data Experience” plugin that allows you to easily add individual data entities to your software catalog, and many more. Plugins have also been added. It includes a built-in “ingester” for retrieving various metadata from the data platform and making it available throughout Backstage.

Last year, Spotify also teased a completely different product for software development teams called . confidence, which is like an A/B experimentation platform based on one of our own internal tools. For now, it’s still a beta product, but Singer says “all systems go live” as it prepares for prime time in the coming months.

“We’re very pleased with the feedback we’ve gotten from beta customers 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 think this is really being put aside because more and more companies are using ML in the same kinds of ways that we optimize things.“