Spotify has announced that starting this year they will be moving their back end cloud platform to Google Cloud Platform globally. The move comes as the streaming service has continued to grow rapidly and the data center requirements and hardware have become painful to manage. The post from Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure, Nicholas Harteau, was candid in their reasons for the move.
But in a business growing quickly in users, markets and features, keeping pace with scaling demands requires ever increasing amounts of focus and effort. Like good, lazy engineers, we occasionally asked ourselves: do we really need to do all this stuff?
For a long time the answer was “yes.” Operating our own data-centers may be a pain, but the core 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. As they say: better the devil you know…
Recently that balance has shifted. The storage, compute and network services available from cloud providers are as high quality, high performance and low cost as what the traditional approach provides.
The post goes on to outline why Spotify selected Google for their cloud platform, pointing out that Google’s data platform and services are what really made the decision “a no-brainer”.
What really tipped the scales towards Google for us, however, has been our experience with Google’s data platform and tools. Good infrastructure isn’t just about keeping things up and
Spotify for Android
running, it’s about making all of our teams more efficient and more effective, and Google’s data stack does that for us in spades.
Google has long been a thought-leader in this space, and this shows in the sophistication and quality of its data offerings. From traditional batch processing with Dataproc, to rock-solid event delivery with Pub/Sub to the nearly magical abilities of BigQuery, building on Google’s data infrastructure provides us with a significant advantage where it matters the most.
The move to Google Cloud Platform will take some time to complete and Spotify will be updating users through their Engineering Blog as things progress.
