Managing Software at Scale: Kelsey Hightower talks with Niklas Gustavsson about Fleet Management

How does Spotify manage a sprawling tech ecosystem made up of 500 squads managing over 10,000 software components in production? Last November, Google Cloud distinguished engineer Kelsey Hightower met with Spotify chief architect Niklas Gustavsson at Spotify’s office in Gothenburg, Sweden, to talk about just that. They discuss the evolution of Spotify’s squad model, the importance of clear ownership (whether it’s for an entire component, a dependency, or just owning a single change to a component), the shift to a fleet-first mindset, how Fleet Management doesn’t just use automation to keep our software ecosystem healthier and more secure, it also helps us improve developer effectiveness by decreasing engineering toil, the things engineers still just have to learn the hard way as part of becoming a better developer, the way Backstage unifies software management by creating a centralized, cohesive UX for your tech ecosystem, the business value of investing in developer experience, making Fleet Management an everyday tool that any team can use, and more.

00:03:03 Evolving the squad model
00:10:40 Moving up the stack
00:13:05 Shifting to a fleet-first mindset
00:19:15 Monorepos vs polyrepos
00:28:49 Managing the fleet
00:34:29 Ownership and fleetwide changes (and Log4j)
00:38:58 Building consensus for large architectural changes
00:41:25 Plugging into Backstage
00:52:09 Investing in developer experience
01:01:14 The future of Fleet Management

Learn more about Fleet Management at Spotify:

• “Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 1): Spotify’s Shift to a Fleet-First Mindset” (https://engineering.atspotify.com/202...)

• “Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 2): The Path to Declarative Infrastructure” (https://engineering.atspotify.com/202...)

• “Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 3): Fleet-wide Refactoring” (https://engineering.atspotify.com/202...)

• NerdOut@Spotify, Episode 12: Fleet First (https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Zoy...)

• NerdOut@Spotify, Episode 22: Declarative Infra and Beyond (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iLZ...)

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