Customer Story Spotify taps into open source innovation with GitHub

You might remember when listening to your favorite music on the go meant tuning a radio, syncing an MP3 player, or adjusting a skipping portable CD player. Now music, podcasts, and more can be streamed across every platform and across the globe. As one of the largest music streaming services, Spotify’s has to work seamlessly—and so Industry Technology/Streaming do all employees working in offices around the world. Behind the streaming industry’s incredible advances are decades of technical Company Size achievements in access, file formats, and algorithms. In the last 10 3,800+ years, Spotify has grown to 217 million active users—but product differentiation and user experience are key in an increasingly crowded streaming industry.

Location With a growing and set of features, Spotify’s development team needs to Stockholm, Sweden collaborate to ensure everything from the client to the back-end infrastructure plays nicely together.

A secure open source foundation Developers across Spotify Product Manager Laurent Ploix works to implement tools, processes, and use GitHub Enterprise Server systems that keep developers (and their code) running smoothly. Ploix’s team for inner source projects and and developers across Spotify use GitHub Enterprise Server for innersource collaboration. They also use projects and collaboration. They also build with GitHub Enterprise Cloud to GitHub Enterprise Cloud to securely open up their code, work with external partners and participate in securely tap into open source the open source community. code-which powers some of the

company’s most popular features. Spotify’s experience in open source is the foundation of some of the company’s most popular features. To power the recommendation-driven From a Swedish startup to “Discover Weekly” playlists, the team builds and maintains Scio, an open one of the largest music source project built on Apache Beam. Scio is an important part of Spotify’s streaming services, Spotify is operation—still, it’s open source because the team believes in the model. now a benchmark for integrated Thousands of contributors mean thousands of ideas, greater diversity of user experiences. thought, and ultimately, more robust ideas.

sales@.com +1(877)448-4820 Breaking down barriers to innovation Ploix sees room to further streamline their review process with the GitHub API. He explained, “The API has the potential to To bring open source innovation to proprietary projects, transform the developer experience. We use a lot of bots to Spotify uses innersource. Innersource allows developers to provide insight into the impact a pull request will make—but run internal projects as if they were open source: working it tends to pollute the conversation. We want to make this openly, learning from each other, and reusing code across information easier to take in and act on. That’s where the the company. “You need both and ownership,” Checks API is going to help.” Ploix said. “When developers own code, they don’t change it for others or work on it exclusively. It means they feel A “one team” approach strongly about it. They care about the quality, and they’re proud of it.” With GitHub Enterprise, no one has to Ultimately teams who own projects at Spotify take on roles relearn the wheel. similar to some open source maintainers. They receive and “ triage new bugs, ideas, and code. According to Ploix, “They When Spotify developers need help, they turn to the GitHub become maintainers, for sure. And with strong ownership, Enterprise Support Team. “We always compare the types of we avoid code piling up where no one knows whether it’s support we get from vendors,” explained Ploix. “We hear back being used or not.” quickly from GitHub with insight into what’s going on—we’ve been really happy with it.” Transforming development with GitHub Fast, thorough support has become even more important as the company grows, stepping up developer recruitment. Ploix Our builds generate a lot of data, said, “The sandbox environment GitHub provides allows our and it’s sometimes difficult to find developers to experiment with new ideas. They don’t have “ the relevant feedback. GitHub to worry about breaking anything fundamental. This sort of enables us to surface feedback in creativity is encouraged, and it’s helped make the Spotify client what it is today.” the pull request and shorten the feedback loop.

Continuous integration (CI) is a central focus of Spotify’s ecosystem. To ensure they’re following best practices for development—fast and incremental iterations—the team built CI systems that integrate with GitHub Enterprise and provide developers with the exact information they need.

Visit us at github.com/enterprise

[email protected] +1(877)448-4820