April 23, 2025
Did that we promote Spotify’s developer productiveness instruments and help to different firms, from on-line retailers and vogue manufacturers to banks and vehicle producers? How did Spotify get into the enterprise of promoting enterprise developer software program? And how does serving the open supply group — to not point out paying company prospects — enhance our personal inner software program practices? Tyson Singer, Spotify’s head of expertise and platforms, shares how our homegrown developer portal advanced from an open supply challenge to our latest enterprise software program product: Spotify Portal for Backstage.
Five years in the past on March 16, 2020, we open sourced Backstage, a framework for constructing inner developer portals (IDPs) just like the one we have been utilizing at Spotify. Despite being a really new thought — the time period “IDP” didn’t even exist again then — the challenge took off on day one, and accelerated from there.
Today, Backstage is the IDP platform of selection — with over 3,000 firms having adopted it to construct IDPs of their very own. Within Spotify, it’s nonetheless what our 700 R&D squads depend on to assist them ship daily. And, oh yeah, we’re additionally constructing an enterprise software program enterprise on prime of it. So how did Spotify get right here? And the place will Backstage take us subsequent?
A platform for developer expertise
Before open sourcing Backstage, we’d already been utilizing it internally for years to assist us remedy an entire vary of developer expertise issues: context switching, fragmentation, cognitive load, silos, duplication, congestion, dependency administration, tech well being, compliance — you identify it, Backstage might develop to assist us handle it. As a centralized platform, it contained the chaos of recent software program improvement whereas making our entire engineering org extra productive and extra environment friendly. It turned invaluable to how we work — and we didn’t need to lose it.
How would we lose it? We’d just lately gone via a painful migration earlier than with one other expertise, the place we needed to transfer from our custom-built resolution to a third-party one which had turn into the usual. We didn’t need to undergo that once more with Backstage. So we open sourced it.
Becoming the trade customary
Backstage had turn into so invaluable to us, we thought different firms would discover it invaluable, too. But we additionally had one other motive for open sourcing it. It wasn’t nearly sharing: Our ambition from the very begin was for Backstage to turn into the usual for IDPs. Because if everybody else was utilizing it, we wouldn’t need to migrate off it.
But you’re not going to turn into the usual simply by being free. The product additionally needs to be good. Even greater than that, for us, Backstage needed to be nice. Because we’re an finish person, too — in all probability probably the most demanding one. We depend upon Backstage to enhance the developer expertise and productiveness of our personal groups, which has a direct influence on our enterprise. As an open supply challenge, we’d additionally get the advantage of exterior contributions, addressing use circumstances we hadn’t even considered but. Sounds nice, proper?
But after all, watch out what you would like for. Now we have been not constructing only for ourselves, now we have been constructing for everybody. And typically it seems like these two issues is likely to be competing with one another. Could we meet the calls for of the skin group whereas nonetheless serving the wants of our personal builders?
How constructing for others has benefited us
Here’s an instance of what it’s been like being each maintainer and finish person of the Backstage challenge: We just lately launched a whole rewrite of the complete backend system. This has been a extremely huge endeavor for us. But we noticed that adopters actually wanted a better method to construct and combine plugins. So we did the work — constructing with the group and rewriting the entire backend over the course of a 12 months.
And when the 1.0 of the brand new backend launched, it was nice. Here are just some of the issues we’ve heard from the group and our enterprise prospects alike: “Makes things a lot easier to maintain.” “You used to have to wire things together across multiple files. Now adding a new plugin is a one-liner.” The new backend “was the game changer 🚀🧑💻.”
Everything concerning the new backend is less complicated to work with — for the group and for us. So, after all, now we’re in the course of fully rewriting the frontend, too. And guess what? That shall be nice for Spotify as finish customers, as nicely.
If we hadn’t open sourced Backstage, I don’t know the way lengthy we’d have stored dwelling with our earlier, extra difficult backend system. Because of the group — each its wants and the best way it permits us to construct higher options — we have been pushed to construct a significantly better model of Backstage for ourselves. And we might additionally rapidly convey these enhancements to our enterprise prospects — via a no-code UI for putting in and managing plugins — in Spotify Portal, our SaaS resolution for Backstage adopters.
Internal → open supply → industrial: The better of all worlds
Spotify Portal is a SaaS resolution for Backstage that brings collectively one of the best of all the pieces we learn about constructing IDPs, each inside and out of doors Spotify. Apply to get the Portal beta.
It’s been lots of push and pull in how we stability inner priorities with exterior ones. But in the end, this can be a virtuous cycle. The ever-popular Notifications characteristic, the Events administration plugin, and the API Docs plugin, which mainly powers our entity pages for API entities — all of those are utilized in Spotify’s inner Backstage occasion, and all have been contributions from the group.
Being a part of a developer group past Spotify has put us in such an awesome place for persevering with to spend money on and develop the Backstage platform. The challenge has improved our personal inner software program practices. We’ve benefited from the innovation of the group at giant. And we’ve been capable of preserve investing within the ecosystem in a approach that improves our industrial Backstage merchandise and brings extra worth to our enterprise prospects.
In 5 years, we’ve gone from mainly only a skinny framework for constructing an IDP, to a greater IDP than we might have constructed by ourselves, and now to a SaaS product that we predict is one of the best IDP for the longer term. This journey will be bumpy. But making that repo public again in 2020 has positively introduced us to a spot we by no means might have imagined at this time. All of which proves out our unique thought: Investing in the neighborhood has been an funding in ourselves, as nicely.
So, completely happy fifth birthday, Backstage! We’ve come far in a short while. But we’re anticipating even larger issues forward.
Watch Tyson share Spotify’s Backstage journey with the open supply group at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London, April 3, 2025
Ready to attempt Backstage for your self? Apply for the Spotify Portal beta — the quickest method to rise up and operating with a Backstage IDP of your personal. Portal combines one of the best of open supply with one of the best of Spotify’s developer expertise and developer productiveness practices.