And while mostly giving Google a pat on the back with this announcement, I felt like it stopped just short of a resounding endorsement when Spotify noted that “it’s a competitive space and we expect the big players to be battling it out for the foreseeable future” nearly as if to say we always have options. The switch will take place over the coming “weeks and months”. Spotify VP of Engineering and Infrastructure, Nicholas Harteau, wrote in a blog post that historically, they have taken a traditional approach to doing this. Given Spotify’s global popularity, the strategy has been to operate as many servers as it could all over the world to ensure rock-solid performance from anywhere.
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“Recently that balance has shifted”.
Spotify said the move to Google Cloud follows on from its history of taking a “traditional approach” to managing its infrastructure by “buying or leasing datacentre space, server hardware, and networking gear as close to our customers as possible”.
It might seems obvious-Of course the music starts when we hit play! Spotify, which maintains more than 2 billion playlists and some 30 million songs, will also use Google BigQuery and Cloud Dataproc to run complex queries and interactive analyses on its really massive data sets.
Founded in 2006, Spotify has until now hosted its service by itself in data centers in its native Stockholm, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States, but has decided that the cloud has matured enough to be able to provide the same service at a lower cost.
Moreover, the process will involve two separate projects – one involving the migration of Spotify’s huge data stacks to the Google Cloud Platform; and the other involving the migration of Spotify services to Google cloud.
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A amusing side note here is that, in a weird way, Google is helping the competition. Then again, it’s in good company: Netflix, which obviously competes with Amazon Prime Video, just finished its migration onto Amazon Web Services. Certainly, Spotify could have chosen to expand service with AWS or even picked Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering to be at the foundation of their service.
