By: Lisa McNally, Head of Cleantech and Sustainability and Tim Cochran, Technical Director
This year, Thoughtworks developers were invited to join Spotify’s annual Hack Week 2022 focused on projects and initiatives that “Make the Planet Cooler.” In support of that theme, the Thoughtworks and Spotify teams partnered to build a Cloud Carbon Footprint plugin for Backstage, an open platform for building developer portals built by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
For five days, the teams worked collaboratively to take Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) — an open source tool that takes advantage of cloud APIs to provide visualizations of estimated carbon emissions on usage across AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure — and built a plugin for Backstage. The resulting CCF plugin we created enables developer teams to make strategic decisions that optimize their cloud infrastructure and reduce their carbon footprint.
Following Spotify’s Hack Week, the CCF plugin was published in the Backstage plugin marketplace, which offers open source features to an adopter’s Backstage deployment. With Backstage’s 150+ publicly listed adopters, even more developers now have a new way to gain visibility around the cloud carbon emissions of their projects and to identify concrete actions towards climate goals.
"As part of Spotify's pathway to net-zero emissions, we leverage Backstage's automation and visibility capabilities to engage our developers in climate advocacy," said Tyson Singer, head of Technology and Platforms at Spotify. "We're excited to launch this integration of Cloud Carbon Footprint so all developers in the Backstage marketplace are empowered to take actionable steps toward a cleaner future for cloud computing."
This exciting announcement builds upon the collaboration we announced with Spotify last year to deliver developer portals to a number of clients, most notably with TELUS. For more information on how we’re working with Spotify and others in the Backstage community to make developers’ lives easier and improve productivity, please contact us at deveffectiveness@thoughtworks.com.