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I'm sure you've all heard of Spotify - the music streaming service that has taken the world by storm. You may not know that Spotify is a prime example of how effective DevOps can be in improving developer productivity.
Spotify achieved massive growth quickly due partly to its use of DevOps principles. But how did they do it?
How does Spotify use DevOps to improve developer productivity? Well, here's a little insight:
1) Spotify placed a strong emphasis on automation
They used various automation tools to help manage their large user base and keep things running smoothly. Spotify automated the whole process of building data pipelines, backend services, and websites. That helped free their developers to focus on new features and improvements rather than fire-fighting issues.
2) They use the DevOps tool to experiment quickly and safely
Spotify has a high-speed release cycle. They use various DevOps tools to help them experiment quickly and safely. These tools help them to automatically roll back changes if something goes wrong. Their developers can try out new features quickly and easily without worrying about breaking things.
3) They automated the project setup process by developing tools such as a test-certification program, Tingle CI/CD, Golden path, and Backstage.
With the help of these tools, they achieved the following:
- Increased developer productivity by automating the project setup process
- Improved quality of their codebase by implementing a strict test-certification program
- Reduced cycle time from idea to production by using CI/CD pipelines
To explain more, the Golden Path tool helps reduce the decision-making required to build backend services, application features, data products etc.
Backstage allows engineers to spend less than 5 minutes setting up Skeleton for a new website, which used to take more than 14 days.
The CI/CD system developed by Spotify called Tingle automatically builds the project when the engineer commits it to GitHub and automatically runs all the tests. This reduced the cycle time from idea to production by more than 50%.
Under the test certification program, any code that matches the certification criteria automatically gets the badge "Tested & Certified".
It is incredible how Spotify has achieved continuous deployment and a short cycle time. They have adopted various techniques like using CI/CD tools, writing tests and following review processes. With the use of DevOps, they have been able to bridge the gap between the software development and operations team, which has helped them achieve their goal of faster time to market.
