12: Fleet First

Instead of performing 10 big software upgrades to our infrastructure every year, what if we did 10,000 small ones, in all our repos, all at once? That’s the idea behind Fleet Management: using automation to take away some of the everyday toil of being a developer, freeing our teams to focus on more interesting problems than migrating to the next version of a low-level software dependency. But for automation at this scale to succeed, our developers would have to be willing to give up some control over their codebases. Could we really get our squad-based culture to adopt a fleet-first mindset?

Spotify’s chief architect, Niklas Gustavsson (aka, ngn), returns to the podcast to talk to host Dave Zolotusky about how we can safely make changes to thousands of repos at once (without bothering the repos’ owners), why adopting Fleet Management at Spotify was a cultural shift as much as a technological one, how having this level of automation in place helped us mitigate the log4j security incident within a few hours, the intricacies of software dependencies, the benefits of tech standards, and more. Welcome to the Fleet.

Learn more:

• Launching soon: Spotify Plugins for Backstage: Read about the Soundcheck plugin, which we use to promote consistency and quality across our 10,000 software components.
• Large-Scale Automated Refactoring Using ClangMR: Read a research paper on Google’s system for maintaining large monorepos — an approach we considered as we formulated our Fleet Management strategy for a multi-repo environment.

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!