Spotify generates the vast bulk of its income from ads and subscriptions, but for the past few years the music-streaming giant has also been quietly building out a developer tooling business. Backstage, a project it open-sourced in 2020, has been adopted by more than 2 million developers across 3,400 organizations, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines.
Backstage helps companies build customized “internal developer portals” (IDPs), bringing order to their infrastructure chaos by combining all their tooling, apps, data, services, APIs, and documents in a single interface.
Want to monitor Kubernetes, view cloud costs, or check your CI/CD status? Enter Backstage.
Backstage in actionImage Credits:Spotify
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which accepted Backstage as an incubating project in 2022, reports that Backstage was one of its top 5 projects last year in terms of velocity and activity. And it’s this momentum that is leading Spotify to double down, with various premium tools and services on the horizon.
Oven-baked
Companies can already use the core Backstage product for free, including an array of open source plugins that extend its functionality. But Spotify started selling premium plugins in 2022, such as Backstage Insights, which displays data related to active Backstage usage within an organization. And last year, Spotify got serious about its dev tools business play, announcing Spotify Portal for Backstage in beta: a premium, oven-baked incarnation for those lacking the resources (or inclination) to set everything up themselves. “Backstage in a box,” is the general idea.
The fully managed SaaS product is now edging toward general availability in the coming months, with design partners and customers including the Linux Foundation and Pager Duty already on board.
“We discovered that there were a lot of different customer profiles,” Tyson Singer (pictured above), Spotify’s head of technology and platforms, explained to TechCrunch in an interview at KubeCon last month. “Our original theory was that Backstage was going to be bigger for mid-size to large enterprises dealing with a lot of complexity, but we found that small companies also see these same problems. And so having a hosted version makes everything so much easier.”
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Spotify also teased a couple of new premium Portal plugins at KubeCon, including AiKA (“AI knowledge assistant”), which is basically a chatbot initially developed internally for its own employees.
AiKA from SpotifyImage Credits:Spotify
The result of a 2023 hackathon, Spotify says that AiKA is now used by 25% of its workforce weekly to query the company’s collective knowledge base. So rather than bombarding support channels in …