According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, online music streaming service Spotify is about to move its business from Amazon.com Inc.’s Web Services to Google’s Cloud Platform.
Spotify has been a major Amazon customer for a long time, but will now move to rival Google, writes Mohid Ahmed for Bidness ETC. According to Spotify’s VP of engineering and infrastructure Nicholas Hateau a deal has been agreed between Spotify and Google, although financial details were not revealed.
Major shift in cloud services market
As it stands Google’s Cloud Platform comes in third in terms of largest cloud services provider behind AWS and Microsoft Corporation’s Azure. Google clients include Sony, Coca-Cola, Snapchat and more. Amazon’s client list includes Comcast Corp., Pfizer Inc., Samsung Electronics and a number of startups.
Hateau said that one reason for the switch is the fact that Google can seamlessly handle huge amounts of data, giving it an edge that marks it out against Amazon. Despite the fact that the streaming service will move over to Google, Spotify will still store all of its music files on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service and deliver music around the world using Amazon’s CloudFront.
Google has won a major victory with the deal. Over 75 million Spotify users will now listen to music using Google infrastructure, partly because it will be easier to calculate metrics. The music streaming service deals with massive amounts of data which is extrapolated before algorithms recommend music to users around the world.
Spotify to focus future business on Google Cloud Platform
Spotify currently contains 30 million songs, while 2 billion playlists are shared and created every day. Amazon stands to lose one of its major customers even though music files will still be stored on its service. Spotify will begin to focus more on Google’s Cloud Platform.
“Recently Spotify decided it didn’t want to be in the data center business, and chose Cloud Platform over the public cloud competition after careful review and testing,” reads Google’s blog post on the announcement.
“The company split their migration to Cloud Platform into two streams: a services track and a data track. Spotify runs their products on a multitude of tiny microservices, several of which are now being moved from on premise data centers into Google’s cloud using our Cloud Storage, Compute Engine and other products.”
