What We Learned at Spotify, Navigating the Clouds

We would like to share some lessons we have learned building a hybrid cloud system at Spotify. The Spotify backend, being very service-oriented, presents some interesting challenges when it comes to setting up development and test environments. Our solution has been to provide a virtualized self-service environment that lets you spawn machines. This environment has evolved over time into a hybrid solution using both Apache Cloudstack and Amazon’s public cloud. There are many pieces to this puzzle touching on topics such as authentication, configuration management, and service discovery.

Noa Resare is a senior engineer at Spotify, currently working with various cloud-related challenges. He is a committer with the Apache Cloudstack project. Noa’s background is in both operations and as a developer, and he has been giving technical presentations at DevOpsdays Göteborg, at Cassandra Europe in London and at Apache Cloudstack meetups in Ghent and in NYC.

Ramon van Alteren is a product owner at Spotify, currently responsible for the testing platform and a large part of the capacity provisioning tools. Ramon’s background is in both development and operations. He has given technical and not so technical presentations at, for example, Devopsdays and Velocity Europe conferences. His current focus is on agile leadership/product ownership for engineering teams.