Spotify has unveiled Confidence, an application for developers to test software. The music platform itself already uses a variant of this platform internally. Confidence should enable developers to deploy A/B tests quickly.
Earlier, Spotify released Backstage, a platform that can bring all tools, applications, services, documents and APIs together for developers. Netflix, Splunk and LinkedIn, among others, are said to make use of it. Confidence is already available in private beta form as a Backstage plugin. It can also run as a managed service on a website or via an API within one’s own IT infrastructure.
Testing at scale
Spotify is drawing on 10 years of experience as a global audio streaming service that has shaped Confidence. The company itself has a very particular field of work, but the testing platform is said to offer a lot of flexibility for all kinds of use cases. It itself developed the technology behind Wrapped albums for end users and an AI DJ by running A/B tests in its own testing application.
Initially, this internal tool was called ABBA, which continued to expand over the years. Spotify migrated to Google Cloud in 2018, discovering that it could do an awful lot of testing with BigQuery. However, other bottlenecks came to light in the process, leading it to wonder how to set up tests more effectively. Eventually, it did away with the old application,
Major improvements
Two major improvements took place to the Experimentation Platform, as it came to be known. A new Metrics Catalog was devised, along with automated analysis, which allowed metrics to be served up quickly. In addition, the company built a coordination engine that allowed many experiments to take place simultaneously.
Thus, it gradually developed a testing platform that will now become available to third parties. Nothing is yet known about the price or an eventual release date of the service.
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