Audio streaming and media service provider Spotify has unveiled a suite of new products and services tailored to enhance internal developer portals (IDPs) built using Backstage.
In a release announcement about Supercharged Developer Portals, Spotify's senior director of engineering for platform developer experience Pia Nilsson introduces three new products to enhance developer portals through the Backstage framework:
- Spotify Plugins for Backstage offers a comprehensive bundle of proven, Spotify-built plugins, including Soundcheck, Role-Based Access Control, Skill Exchange, and Insights. These plugins empower users to customise their portals effectively.
- Spotify Enterprise Support for Backstage provides personalised assistance from Backstage experts, aiding in the building, maintaining, and customising of portals to meet specific requirements.
- Spotify Portal for Backstage offers a full-featured Internal Developer Portal (IDP) designed for quick setup and easy maintenance. A live demo claims this can be set up in under five minutes without coding.
As background to these new Backstage-related products, also covered in part in a well-received talk at QCon London 2024, Nilsson explains how Backstage became popular. She describes how managing software complexity has become a Herculean task amidst the proliferation of technologies such as microservices, cloud platforms, and the burgeoning domain of generative AI. Companies are navigating labyrinthine tech stacks, grappling with fragmented workflows and shouldering heightened cognitive burdens on their engineering teams.
In response to these challenges, Spotify's Backstage framework originated as a software catalogue within Spotify and has now evolved into a comprehensive IDP, providing developers with a unified platform to manage various aspects of tech infrastructure. Backstage simplifies software development processes by offering a centralised hub, thus promoting collaboration, knowledge sharing, and self-service, empowering developers to reach their full potential.
Internal data from Spotify indicates substantial improvements in developer productivity among frequent Backstage users. Internal studies reveal that these users exhibit commendable activity levels on GitHub, produce higher-quality code within shorter timeframes, and deploy software more frequently and reliably.
Spotify's decision to open-source Backstage and donate it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has democratised its access. It has been widely adopted, with over 2,200 project contributors, 3,000 adopting companies, consulting firms, and tech services offering support and plugins.
Nilsson continues by explaining how the team finds insights to build developer tools - sourcing data from the internal R&D community of Spotifiers, the open-source community of developers and users, and their enterprise customers and partners. In a webinar unveiling these products, Spotify's Backstage team explained the company's commitment to empowering developers across various industries regardless of company size or technological maturity.
To learn more about Spotify's latest offerings for Backstage, find the new release announcement and visit backstage.spotify.com.