Decoding Software Architecture Of Spotify How Microservices Empowers Spotify - Techahead

1. DECODING SOFTWARE
ARCHITECTURE OF SPOTIFY:
HOW MICROSERVICES
EMPOWERS SPOTIFY
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2. The success and popularity of Spotify have stunned
everyone - right from the music and entertainment
industry to the technology and business world.
Spotify was launched to counter the rising menace
of music piracy. It was estimated that 30-40% of
revenues generated by the music industry were
lost due to piracy, and artists who created original
music failed to get fairly compensated for their art.
Understanding these problems, Daniel Ek and
Martin Lorentzon from Sweden launched Spotify in
2006 and instantly became the world’s most
popular music streaming service.

3. With more than 422 million active users and 182 million paid
users, Spotify has topped the charts of the music streaming
industry and is right now one of the most preferred and popular
platforms for accessing all kinds of music, easily and seamlessly.
Spotify is available across 182 nations, hosts 82 million+ songs, and
is available to users in both free and freemium mode, with
revenues generated from advertisements, and paid subscriptions.
Spotify has an interesting revenue model, which is unlike the
traditional music industry, where the artists are paid based on
every song sold. With Spotify, record labels who own the rights to
the music are paid upto 70% royalty of the revenues generated,
and the artists get paid from these record labels directly.

4. In this blog, we will discuss the software architecture behind Spotify, and
understand how they are able to support billions of music streams,
concurrently for millions of users.
Decoding Software Architecture Of Spotify
Software architecture is the blueprint and the roadmap, based on which
the entire software is created, and every mobile/digital platform needs a
software architecture to start with.
There are basically two types of software architecture that companies
usually rely on: Monolithic Architecture and Microservices.
Spotify is based entirely on Microservices architecture, which has been
confirmed and explained by Kevin Goldsmith, who was the former CTO
at Spotify.

5. The software architecture of Spotify is heavily dependent on services,
and this is the reason microservices-based architecture was finalized
for Spotify, and it worked.
The backend of Spotify needs hundreds of services, most of them tiny
and simple, but they need to be served in run-time, without any delay.
In order to serve these hundreds of services, Spotify's technical team
deployed a microservices-based architecture, wherein it serves to
address one single service-need at a time: Be it song retrieval, sharing
recommendations, searching, or simply user verification (for free and
paid model).
API for User Personalization
Why Microservices Architecture At Spotify?

6. HOW DO SERVICES WORK & RESPOND?
Services are usually written in Python and/or Java language, with few
exceptions. And they communicate with one another via Hermes
protocol, which Spotify has developed from scratch using ZeroMQ and
Protobuf.
However, some older services created in the beginning still use HTTP
and XML/JSON for communication.
For database and storage-based services, PostgreSQL & Cassandra are
used by Spotify. Cassandra is preferred for content-based services
such as searching the songs or retrieving metadata of the songs, in
run-time.

7. There exists a highly specialized backend service called ‘accesspoint’, which is
constantly in touch with various clients, for swift and precise communication.
The protocol which enabled seamless communication between the clients and
the ‘accesspoint’ has also been built by Spotify engineers, and hasn’t been
made public.
Software infrastructure within Spotify is heavily dependent on Debian, while
open-source software is preferred for various activities.
Cross-Site Communication
The Secret Of Swift Music Streaming On Spotify
Now, we have an overview of how services work and respond, and we have
shared why Microservices-based software architecture has been deployed at
Spotify.

8. Now, here is a secret about why Spotify is able to swiftly retrieve songs for
the end-users, and why music streaming is so fast, and reliable.
Within the Microservices based architecture, there are hundreds of software
developers working concurrently, who are managing different types of
services and their communication.
Now, the secret is that each of these software developers is working in a
closed territory, with specific functionalities and missions. Every microservice
has just one responsibility and objective, and a majority of such
microservices have their own private database with their own logic, and they
cannot be intervened by other databases of other microservices.

9. PERSONAL SKILLS
This is the reason Spotify is so fast, and precise, and fulfills the end-user's
needs so promptly.
Once a request has been placed for any specific task, the application
responds swiftly, deploying different services across different machines,
and having personalized and customized performance parameters,
depending on the specific service being called.
Seamless Change Management Of Logic
Now, what if the software developer needs to change the logic of any feature?
There isn’t any issue of time lag or disruption of the entire application, because each
microservice has its own logic, and implementing changes is very easy.

10. The specific service which is connected with the feature needs to be worked
upon, the edits are made, and then only that service is tested, and then instantly
deployed.
Hence, that service is now changed, logic altered, and the feature will now have
new functionality. This service will start communicating with the application once
the deployment is done, and there is absolutely no need for the entire application
to be re-tested, and re-deployed.
This change management feature of microservices being used as the software
architecture of Spotify is one of the strongest and most powerful capabilities,
which makes Spotify fast and user-friendly.
Interestingly, the software architecture of Spotify has been developed in a way
that all the possible clients of the application: mobile, desktop/laptops, and
libspotify (Spotify’s embeddable library), all share a common codebase.

11. SOURCE:
Using this common code-base, the developers can modify or enhance the
client functionality and offer a unique user interface for the end users.
Since this common code-base is written in C++ language, changes and edits in
the main user interface are also easy and seamless. The specific platform
adoptions are written in platform-specific languages, for example, ObjC for
iOS.
If you are looking for audio streaming app development, then our team at
TechAhead can help you right away. Based on your specific requirements, we
can deploy Spotify-inspired software architecture for your mobile app, loaded
with powerful and scalable features.
Schedule an appointment with our Mobile App engineers right here.
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