NerdOut@Spotify

In part two of ARM-ing ourselves with Google Axion, Dave is joined by Max Charas, a senior staff engineer at Spotify who’s been leading much of the migration work on our Google Axion journey, for a deep dive into the validation and technical side of our move to Google’s new ARM-based processors.Dave and Max unpack what went smoothly, what got bumpy, and what you only discover when you try to run thousands of services on brand-new silicon. Expect the usual nerdiness — performance gains, per-core scaling, bin-packing puzzles — as well as look at the less glamorous bits like discount models, capacity planning, and the logistical reality of working with real hardware. Because as it turns out, the hardest parts weren’t always technical. It was the massive coordination effort behind them that became a logistical puzzle on a global scale.This episode is a practical look at how a large-scale system evolves when its foundation shifts — and how much just works when you’ve built solid abstractions.Learn more about Google Axion Processors: Leading processors custom-built for cloud workloadsIntroducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUsC4A VMs now GA: Our first custom Arm-based Axion CPUAxion in action: Unlock price-performance and efficiency with Google Axion VMsThe Impact of Google Cloud’s Arm-Based Axion Chip: ExplainedBenchmarks Of Google's Axion Arm-based CPU: Competitive Performance & Compelling ValueRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Spotify is in the middle of a big shift in modern computing: moving from x86 processors to Google’s new ARM-based Axion chips. This isn’t just a hardware swap — it’s a disruptive change with ripple effects across performance, efficiency, and sustainability.In this episode, we sit down with Mo Farhat, Group Product Manager for Google Compute Engine, to unpack what makes ARM so game-changing in the data center. From the history of ARM’s rise, to the challenges of designing chips for hyperscale workloads, to why this transition matters for the future of cloud computing, Mo offers a look inside how Axion was built and why now is the tipping point for ARM.If you’ve ever wondered what really powers the services you use every day — and why Spotify is betting on Axion — this is the episode to listen to.Learn more about Google Axion Processors: Leading processors custom-built for cloud workloadsIntroducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUsC4A VMs now GA: Our first custom Arm-based Axion CPUAxion in action: Unlock price-performance and efficiency with Google Axion VMsThe Impact of Google Cloud’s Arm-Based Axion Chip: ExplainedRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Hear about the journey behind building Spotify’s AI knowledge assistant, aka AiKA — from hack projects to internal chatbot, to enterprise developer tool.While general purpose chatbots are being used everywhere, they often fall short when it comes to navigating company-specific information — like which internal policy applies to your team or where to find the doc someone shared in Slack three months ago. That’s why we built AiKA. Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AiKA taps into Spotify’s internal knowledge sources to provide employees with context-aware answers right when they need them.Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky is joined by senior engineers Majd Salman and Jofre Mateu to discuss AiKA’s evolution from a bunch of hack week experiments to a unified chatbot platform now used weekly by 25% of Spotify’s employees and 87% of our developers. They share why RAG is the right approach for making an internal chatbot accurate and fast, how AiKA has cut the time it takes to resolve internal support requests by 47%, and how we’re extending AiKA’s agentic capabilities with MCP.🤖 Want to see how AiKA can supercharge knowledge sharing where you work? Sign up to try Spotify Portal for Backstage at: https://backstage.spotify.com/try-portal/ Learn more about Spotify’s AI knowledge assistant:Our KubeCon talk: Leveraging Internal Knowledge: Building AiKA at SpotifyThe New Stack: Introducing AiKA: Backstage Portal AI Knowledge AssistantTechCrunch: Backstage access: Spotify’s dev tools side-hustle is growing legsSpotify’s Backstage Blog: AI knowledge assistant and data plugins coming to Spotify PortalRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: ⁠engineering.atspotify.com⁠You should follow us on Twitter ⁠@SpotifyEng⁠, ⁠LinkedIn⁠, and ⁠YouTube⁠!

Last year Spotify launched a big update to the app: a new typeface. For most of us, changing fonts is easy. It’s just a dropdown menu away. But creating a whole new typeface and then rolling it out across 45 unique platforms, and over 2,000 types of devices spread across 200 brands – that’s not so simple. This brand new font is called Spotify Mix and it was made just for Spotify. From playlists to microsites and billboards, it’s what you’ll see everywhere you see Spotify, representing the brand’s distinctive voice. In this episode, we’ll get into the technical and aesthetic challenges that go into creating and deploying a new typeface as well as what made its release possible: Spotify’s internal design system, known as Encore. Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky speaks with two people on Spotify’s design platform team who helped bring Spotify Mix to the world: an iOS engineer and “Spotify’s one and only typographer” — a designer who specializes in type and fonts.Learn more about Spotify Mix and our internal design system, Encore:Introducing Spotify Mix, Our New and Exclusive Font — SpotifyCreating coherence: How Spotify’s design system goes beyond platforms — FigmaDesign Systems Podcast, Ep. 84: Digital typography: Suggesting, not dictatingRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Ever heard of Kubernetes? Envoy? Prometheus? You probably have. But what you may not know is that these projects are managed and sustained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, aka the CNCF. Cloud native computing allows IT and software to move faster, and open source projects are essential to furthering these innovations and keeping them accessible for everyone. The CNCF is dedicated to fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. In fact, Spotify donated Backstage to the CNCF in September 2020 and it moved to incubating maturity level March 2022. To celebrate the CNCF’s 10th year, host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky speaks with Chris Aniszczyk, Chief Technology Officer at the CNCF to better understand what an open source foundation is, what it does, and why it matters so much to the developer community. Plus, we’ll get a sneak peek at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe.Learn more about Chris Aniszczyk, the CNCF, and open source:NerdOut@Spotify, Ep.02: Open IssuesNerdOut@Spotify, Ep.11: Open Source Work Is WorkCloud Native Computing Foundation blogChris Aniszczyk on TwitterChris's Open Source Velocity ReportsCertified Backstage Associate certification and other certificationsRegister for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon LondonRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Register for Spotify’s roadmap webinar on April 30, 2024 — and see what’s coming next from Spotify for Backstage, the open source platform for building internal developer portals. We’ll show you our latest developer tools, including a sneak peek at new Spotify Plugins for Backstage and a first-look at Spotify Portal for Backstage — a full-featured developer portal that is quick and easy for any engineering org to adopt. See demos from Spotify’s team and learn how to apply for the private beta — work with us to build the next great developer portal: yours! Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky has a quick chat with Helen Greul, head of engineering for Backstage at Spotify, about the event. They talk about the CNCF’s recent BackstageCon in Paris, the growing popularity of the Backstage platform, and why the roadmap webinar on April 30 isn’t one to miss for fans of developer experience and wizardry. Register for the April 30 roadmap webinar Learn more about Spotify and Backstage Listen to Ep. 01: What Is Backstage? Watch the 2-minute Backstage explainer video Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with Kyle Buttner, a product manager on Spotify’s insights team, to discuss Spotify's journey in measuring developer productivity — from how we evaluate different frameworks (like DORA and SPACE) to what kind of data we collect, to the role Backstage plays in unifying our development practices. Can productivity metrics really draw an accurate picture of your engineering org and show you the way to happier and more productive developers? Learn more about how we measure developer happiness and productivity at Spotify: How Spotify measures the value of Backstage: Read about how Spotify’s frequent and less frequent Backstage users compare across three metrics: developer activity, development lifecycle, and developer retention. (Plus, a bonus metric on retention!) How Backstage Made Our Developers More Effective: Here’s a metric that was starting to scare us: new employees were taking up to 60 days before they made their tenth pull request. Register for the Spotify for Backstage roadmap webinar: Join us on April 30 to learn about our latest tools for improving developer happiness and productivity. Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

How did we learn to do event delivery at scale at Spotify? It’s been a journey. When you do something like tap the play button in the Spotify app, that’s an event. And getting that event data is fundamental to the Spotify experience. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to make music recommendations, pay artists fairly, or track down pesky, hard-to-find bugs. At the most basic level, this seems like a straightforward process: record an event, send that event data to a server somewhere, do something useful with it. Easy, right? But now, multiply that process by 50 million events per second. So, how do we make sure all that important data is delivered reliably, from our client apps to the cloud?  Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with 9-year Spotify veteran Riccardo Petrocco about our journey building a event delivery system that can reliably handle a trillion events around the world, moving from Kafka to the cloud, building systems that are simple enough so that nobody tries to find a way around them and encourages “doing the right thing”, the definition of “quality data”, the value of moving up the stack and focusing less on the data pipes and more on what’s in them, and how Backstage makes it easier for our developers to discover, consume, produce, and manage data.  Learn more about Spotify’s data journey: NerdOut@Spotify, Ep.09: It’s All About the Data Data stories on the Spotify Engineering Blog Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

We’ve seen generative AI and large language models do some amazing things in the past year — but how do you go from a tech demo to a real shipping product? In this Release Notes episode of the NerdOut@Spotify podcast, we’ll hear about what it took to ship our Voice Translation pilot, which takes podcasts recorded in English and uses AI to generate the original podcaster’s voice speaking in Spanish (with German and French coming next). Host Dave Zolotusky talks with senior machine learning engineering manager Sandeep Ghael about how we brought expertise from across the company in order to go from a weekend prototype to releasing fully translated episodes of Lex Fridman, Armchair Expert, and other podcasts — in just six weeks. Read more about Voice Translation for podcasts: Spotify’s AI Voice Translation Pilot Means Your Favorite Podcasters Might Be Heard in Your Native Language Hear the results on Spotify: Lex Fridman Podcast — “Interview with Yuval Noah Harari” Armchair Expert — “Kristen Bell, by the grace of god, returns” The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett — “Interview with Dr. Mindy Pelz” More episodes on the Voice Translation Hub Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!

Over the summer, Spotify helped Tesla engineers ship a major update to their built-in media player. In this Release Notes episode, host Dave Zolotusky talks with Spotify engineering manager Geetika Arora and senior product designer JC Chhim about collaborating with Tesla to improve the in-car listening experience, the value of having a familiar user experience across devices, and how there’s more to a great collaboration than just picking the right SDK for the job. Introducing Release Notes — a new series of mini episodes on the NerdOut@Spotify podcast. There are hundreds of teams at Spotify working on so many different things — from playlists that change throughout the day, to realistic voice translations, to a smarter way to shuffle songs. In each episode of Release Notes, we focus on one thing we shipped and what went into building it. You’ll see these mini episodes from time to time in the main podcast feed right alongside our regular episodes. Learn more about our SDKs on the Spotify for Developers site: developer.spotify.com Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng and on LinkedIn!