Spotify, best known for its excellence in streaming music and podcasts, quietly cultivated a budding developer tooling business in recent years, anchored by Backstage, an open-source project it first released in 2020. Today, Backstage has emerged as an essential component for more than two million developers spread across some 3,400 organizations, including prominent brands like Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines.
The platform centers around building customized internal developer portals (IDPs), effectively consolidating an organization’s scattered digital assets—such as tools, services, APIs, data, and documentation—into one cohesive interface. With Backstage, tasks ranging from managing Kubernetes clusters to keeping track of cloud expenses and monitoring CI/CD pipelines can be performed seamlessly from a unified dashboard.
Backstage’s swift rise has captured the attention of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which reported that it ranked among the five most active and rapidly developing projects last year. Leveraging this momentum, Spotify is planning strategic expansions with enhanced premium services that augment Backstage’s core offerings.
Initially, organizations could use the open-source platform without charge, coupled with a variety of community-built plugins for added functionality. Spotify, however, began monetizing certain advanced plugins starting in 2022. Among these paid products, Backstage Insights provides visibility into developer engagement and platform usage within a company.
Building further on this approach, in 2024 Spotify introduced the beta version of Spotify Portal for Backstage—a fully managed, hosted version of Backstage targeting organizations seeking an effortless setup. Described as “Backstage in a box,” this paid, managed service is quickly approaching wider commercial release. Early adopters already include significant industry groups like the Linux Foundation as well as organizations such as PagerDuty.
Spotify’s Tyson Singer, head of technology and platforms, explained that this evolution toward premium offerings is driven by customer needs that spread across vastly different company profiles and team sizes. While initially envisioned primarily for mid-size to larger companies, it became clear that even smaller companies maintain similar requirements and complexities. Consequently, Spotify Portal for Backstage fills the gap, granting access to the powerful internal developer portal without demanding extensive internal resources.
Moreover, Spotify recently previewed additional premium integrations at the KubeCon conference, unveiling tools such as AiKA (“AI Knowledge Assistant”). Originally created for internal use, AiKA began as a hackathon project in 2023 and quickly achieved widespread internal adoption, now regularly accessed by around a quarter of Spotify’s staff. AiKA serves as an intelligent internal chatbot, trained over the organization’s own documentation, knowledge databases, and internal data sources. Employees utilize AiKA to swiftly answer common or complex queries, eliminating inefficiencies associated with traditional slack-channel support approaches.
AiKA’s early successes resulted in a positive feedback loop—staff were prompted to regularly update documentation, thus continually enhancing AiKA’s effectiveness and accuracy. Encouraged by internal results, Spotify is preparing to provide third-party companies with an alpha version of AiKA. Although initially limited compared to its internal variant, the externalized AiKA marks an important step in fortifying Backstage’s attractiveness as a premium platform.
In parallel, Spotify has been developing another in-house developer product named Confidence, an experimental A/B testing platform introduced about 20 months ago. While Confidence is not yet publicly available—security being paramount as Spotify has only allowed controlled customer onboarding—Singer indicated that Spotify may soon integrate Confidence’s capabilities, particularly feature-flagging functionality, directly into Backstage Portal itself.
Spotify’s efforts at shaping a full-fledged developer tooling division trace back a decade. At the time, the company built a container orchestration system named Helios, aimed at managing microservices architectures more effectively. Although Helios was eventually open-sourced, it lost out to Kubernetes, a Google-originated rival, forcing Spotify’s own engineers to undergo a challenging transition to Kubernetes.
Motivated partly by that prior experience, Spotify is determined that Backstage will become—and remain—the industry-standard internal developer portal, minimizing future costly migrations that accompanied the Kubernetes transition. For Singer and his team, successfully commercializing Backstage is more than just a strategic business move; it’s about preventing that painful scenario from recurring.
Fundamentally, the company now views developer tooling not merely as a supporting function, but potentially as one of Spotify’s key future verticals. With Portal, premium integrations, AiKA, and a forthcoming Confidence rollout, Spotify appears poised to capitalize on the enormous value it already holds internally, aiming now to translate that into substantial and enduring external business growth.
