6 min Applications

Spotify Portal aims to rock it with developers

Spotify Portal aims to rock it with developers

Music, podcast and audiobook business Spotify wants to be regarded as a platform company that software application developers can tap into and use to create. The company has now extended its developer tools to be coalesced inside the new Spotify Portal. This is an Internal Developer Platform built by Spotify’s Backstage team. In the age of platform engineering, when IDPs hold the promise of self-service computing for developers who want to elevate themselves above the distraction of working with operations to get their infrastructure provisioning handled in an abstracted and automated way, does this technology rock the house?

As a reminder, Spotify Backstage is the company’s open source technology framework for building IDPs that help manage and unify software development environments. As a further note, let’s remember that IDPs are an elevation towards infrastructure abstractions designed to enable programmers to concentrate on building code and less time managing dependencies, interconnections and configurations.

Collaboration innovation situation

Calling this development a milestone moment, the team explain that the work here has stemmed from collaboration with incident management company PagerDuty, Koho ( a Canadian financial technology company), 2K Games and The Linux Foundation. Spotify says it wants to “redefine how engineering and developer teams collaborate and innovate”, which, although a worthy enough platitude, does arguably rather jar with the central concepts of an IDP and platform engineering, where developers gain a new level of abstraction from engineering.

AI is reshaping how organisations build, ship and scale software. The potential of its speed, scale and problem-solving power goes far beyond incremental gains; it represents a paradigm shift in how businesses approach product development and IT. But to unlock that potential, companies need strong foundations. Engineering organisations are under immense pressure to deliver faster, improve reliability, and do more with less. AI alone doesn’t solve those challenges; it amplifies them if the underlying systems are fragmented or inconsistent,” states the Spotify blogging team, in a press statement.

All of these reasons are why, for many platform engineering advocates, the self-service software application development route remains the key. 

Standardisation, alignment & discoverability 

The team assert that standardisation, alignment and discoverability aren’t made obsolete by AI; they’re what make AI effective. Just like humans, large language models get lost in messy, unstructured environments. The engineers involved here say that Spotify Portal combines developer velocity, operational insight and AI-powered assistance into – wait for it (that term all the tech vendors love – a single pane of glass. 

Spotify Portal users will have access to Confidence, Spotify’s internal product experimentation platform designed to add additional data services. Developers can use this tool to design, run and analyse experiments directly within Spotify Portal to validate ideas and optimise workflows.

A catalogue of catalogs

“The Backstage catalogue is the backbone of any developer platform, keeping track of websites, APIs, services etc. The new Catalog Wizard makes it easier than ever to keep this catalog up to date, no YAML required. Teams can now create and update entries directly in the Portal UI, or generate pull requests automatically for YAML-based workflows,” notes Spotify.

Other features include Promoted Plugins i.e. users can now install trusted, pre-evaluated plugins directly into their portal instance, whether they come from community contributors or official partners. Portal Studio helps build integrations directly within a portal instance – and this allows developers to plug into an instantaneous feedback loop while they build.

A template editor allows teams to create and customise scaffolder templates using a library of UI components and reusable actions. Soundcheck (Spotify’s internal scorecard for engineering quality) now lets developers measure and improve their technical health. It’s the same tool Spotify uses to evaluate its own systems, now available to everyone.

AiKA, Spotify Portal’s AI-powered assistant, now connects to third-party MCP servers like Confluence and GitHub and can trigger native Portal actions through a unified agentic interface. AiKA can also function as a third-party MCP server itself, letting developers use it in tools like Cursor and Copilot to tap into the data within their Portal instance.

“We believe Portal is the best IDP solution for most companies because it provides a complete experience. First, it is simple: We’ve made it easy for any company – even those who have never used Backstage or any IDP before – to get up and running quickly. So they can realise the value of Portal quickly, even just as a POC,” said Pia Nilsson, senior director of engineering at Spotify.

Nilsson says that Portal is opinionated i.e. it provides what she calls “a premium user experience” throughout, including exclusive plugins, all based on Spotify’s platform engineering expertise.

“Portal represents the best of what we know about developer experience at Spotify. In the end, that is an IDP’s purpose. That is why choosing one is unlike choosing a typical enterprise product. It does not succeed on lock-in or just by checking off a required feature list from your IT team. An IDP has to win on the quality of the experience that it provides your developers. That is where the value is,” said Nilsson.

Are IDPs the answer?

All of which is wonderful news, if, that is, you subscribe to the platform engineering ethos, the mantra of the IDP and the gospel according to self-service developer autonomy. But – and there are buts – not everyone is convinced. Many argue that automated IDP security, identity and wider aspects of system architecture management should not be something that developers have to oversee, even when they come from an IDP. Others say that IDPs run counter to the DevOps concepts that have pushed so hard to form a more productive union between developers and operations. Still others argue that the old ways weren’t that broken and so we really don’t need to fix things.

All of that said, there is AI-driven acceleration here, so there is an inevitability of implementation if developers themselves can get with the beat and straddle what is also a cultural workflow and workplace change.

A group of people stand outdoors wearing black T-shirts with logos of metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, and Iron Maiden.