Spotify, renowned for its music streaming services, has been quietly revolutionizing the developer experience with its open-source platform, Backstage. Launched in 2020, Backstage has rapidly become a cornerstone for over 3,400 organizations, including industry giants like Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines. This platform enables companies to construct customized internal developer portals (IDPs), streamlining their infrastructure by consolidating tools, applications, data, services, APIs, and documentation into a unified interface.
The Genesis of Backstage
Backstage was born out of Spotify’s need to manage its complex and rapidly growing engineering ecosystem. As the company expanded, its autonomous engineering culture led to a fragmented infrastructure, causing challenges in discoverability and management of services. To address these issues, Spotify developed Backstage to provide a centralized platform where developers could find, manage, and create software components efficiently. By unifying all infrastructure tooling and services under a single, consistent UI, Backstage empowers developers to innovate quickly and at scale.
Core Features of Backstage
Backstage offers several key features designed to enhance developer productivity:
1. Software Catalog: A centralized repository that allows teams to organize and discover software components within their organization. This feature provides a consistent view of all services, libraries, websites, and models, along with key metadata, reducing the time spent searching for information.
2. Documentation Hub (TechDocs): Supports technical documentation, API documentation, and markdown files, ensuring developers have easy access to the information they need for their projects. This approach promotes a docs-like-code methodology, where documentation lives alongside the code, enhancing accessibility and maintenance.
3. Plugin Architecture: Enables teams to extend functionality by creating custom plugins to integrate existing tools and services, enhancing the platform’s capabilities. This extensibility allows for distributed code ownership, empowering teams to build and maintain features independently.
4. Software Templates: Provides a foundation for software templates and a radiator for target engineering standards, allowing developers to create new microservices or components with a few clicks, following best practices.
Impact on Developer Productivity
The adoption of Backstage has led to significant improvements in developer productivity and satisfaction. Spotify’s internal studies reveal that frequent Backstage users are 2.3 times more active in GitHub, create twice as many code changes in 17% less cycle time, deploy software twice as often, and their software is deployed for three times as long. Additionally, these users are 5% more likely to remain at Spotify a year later, indicating a positive impact on developer retention.
Furthermore, Backstage has streamlined the onboarding process for new developers. The time required for onboarding has been reduced from 60 days to 20 days, allowing new team members to become productive more quickly.
Expansion and Premium Offerings
Building on the success of the open-source platform, Spotify has introduced premium tools and services to further enhance the Backstage experience. In 2022, Spotify began offering premium plugins such as Backstage Insights, which displays data related to active Backstage usage within an organization. Additionally, Spotify announced the Spotify Portal for Backstage, a fully managed SaaS product designed for organizations lacking the resources or inclination to set up Backstage themselves. This Backstage in a box approach simplifies the adoption process for companies of all sizes.
Spotify has also been enhancing existing plugins like Soundcheck, which visualizes and tracks the development of software components. Recent updates include a no-code interface that allows non-programmers to add checks and tracks through a graphical interface without writing code, making it more accessible and secure.
Community and Open Source Contributions
Backstage’s open-source nature has fostered a vibrant community of over 2,200 project contributors and 3,000 adopting companies. The platform’s extensibility through plugins has enabled organizations to tailor Backstage to their specific needs, integrating various tools and services seamlessly. This collaborative ecosystem has led to continuous improvements and innovations, benefiting all users.
Conclusion
Spotify’s Backstage has emerged as a transformative tool in the realm of developer portals, offering a unified platform that enhances productivity, collaboration, and developer satisfaction. By addressing the challenges of fragmented infrastructures and providing a customizable, extensible solution, Backstage empowers organizations to streamline their development processes and foster a more efficient engineering culture.
