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Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

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Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#3
I’m not sure who the customer is for Backstage.

For a small startup, poking around in the gcp/aws console works well enough. Maintaining another console layer on top of that feels like one more thing that could break.

If you’re a big company with a team that could support developer platform tools, you probably have some sort of portal system hacked together and you’ll never be able to change because somebody has a critical dependency on the old system

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#5
post #3

I’m not sure who the customer is for Backstage. For a small startup, poking around in the gcp/aws console works well enough. Maintaining another console layer on top of that feels like one more thing that could break. If you’re a big company with a team that could support developer platform tools, you probably have some sort of portal system hacked together and you’ll never be able to change because somebody has a cr…

The big company use case is the ideal backstage use. Backstage is just a framework. you can use it to interface with the old system behind the scenes and provide a nicer layer on top for your application devs.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#6
post #3

I’m not sure who the customer is for Backstage. For a small startup, poking around in the gcp/aws console works well enough. Maintaining another console layer on top of that feels like one more thing that could break. If you’re a big company with a team that could support developer platform tools, you probably have some sort of portal system hacked together and you’ll never be able to change because somebody has a cr…

Glad I'm not the only one confused. Even the product purpose seems vague...

> Libraries, websites, ML models — you name it, Backstage knows all about it

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#7
post #3

I’m not sure who the customer is for Backstage. For a small startup, poking around in the gcp/aws console works well enough. Maintaining another console layer on top of that feels like one more thing that could break. If you’re a big company with a team that could support developer platform tools, you probably have some sort of portal system hacked together and you’ll never be able to change because somebody has a cr…

Backstage is great at slowly migrating dysfunctional organizations into slightly less dysfunctional organizations. I deal with 30 years of random tech debt in a company with immense shadow IT (domains randomly registered, vendors randomly hired to do X, often nobody knows things are still needed, our zonefiles are a mess, unclear responsibilities with our team of 4 being the default fallback), and Backstage at least puts some semblance of insight into that entire mess and provides a way forward to formalize such processes. Also, putting documentation where developers commit to every day instead of a Wiki where it's out of sight / out of mind is very underrated.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#8
It is tough to keep two widely different businesses under one roof. One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup.

Spotify should spin off Backstage as a separate company, providing the initial IP and funding and being the first client.

Many companies, like Uber, created a lot of useful infra, though they failed to monetize it. They could take a cut in the Chronosphere (M3) and Temporal (Cadence).

Much better than laying off people, though origin companies would need to be smart, without being too greedy.

Though the model is unproven.

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#9

[flagged]

What do you mean by "sensible"? Spotify has playlists, but most listeners simply don't bother. Plus, it's obviously convenient for the platform to actually control what you're going to listen to next, so obviously they'd rather emphasize the "magic" auto-queueing (which, tbh, kinda works well-enough).

Re: Spotify getting into enterprise IT tools

#10
Has anyone successfully implemented Backstage at their company? How'd it go?

We're looking at it for an internal platform serving ~50 engineers today, spanning mobile, backend, enterprise integrations, and ML teams. The hope is it'll make it easier to spin up new things "the right way" without e.g. ML PhDs having to learn Helm and K8s, plus other goodies like nice docs.

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