Spotify to abandon own hosting infrastructure and move to Google Cloud

Popular music streaming service Spotify will exit its owned and operated data centres globally to take up residence in Google facilities as a new user of its cloud infrastructure platform.

Separately, Harteau told the Wall Street Journal that Spotify would continue to store its music files on Amazon Simple Storage Service.

According to a post on the matter on the Google Cloud Platform Blog, Spotify is now implementing Google Cloud Datastore and Google Cloud Bigtable, as well as also deploying Google’s Cloud Networking services, such as Direct Peering, Cloud VPN, and Cloud Router, to transfer petabytes of data. Cloud computing gives the company the ability to expand and operate more efficiently, and do so at a cost lower than that of managing private data centers, Mr. Harteau said.

For Google, the Spotify deal represents a coup at a time when the Mountain View, Calif., company appears to be slipping farther behind Amazon and Microsoft. He said that “good infrastructure isn’t just about keeping things up and running, it’s about making all of our teams more efficient and more effective”, and the search engine’s data stack does that for them in spades.

“What really tipped the scales towards Google for us, however, has been our experience with Google’s data platform and tools”, he said.

Spotify has already moved a quarter million accounts onto Google’s servers and plans to move its entire, 75-million-strong subscriber base into Google Cloud Platform over the next 18 months. Cloud services were not “at a level of quality, performance and cost that would make cloud a significantly better option for Spotify in the long run”.

“We have a large and complex backend, so this is a large and complex project that will take us some time to complete”, Harteau says.

Dave Bartoletti, a principal analyst with Forrester Research Inc., called the deal “a great win for Google” and said he believes Spotify chose Google specifically for its data-analytics service known as BigQuery. Now a Google outage has the possibility of taking Spotify down with it, much like how Netflix is one of many sites to go down whenever Amazon has issues, which happens with some regularity.