Category: Google Cloud Services

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.