With its paid subscriber base climbing steadily, Spotify has decided to move away from its own data centers and onto the cloud. Spotify announced in a blog post Tuesday that Google’s Cloud Platform will be the new home of its infrastructure.
As the streamer’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Nicholas Harteau, wrote in the post, the news is “a big deal.” For years, the company opted to operate its own data centers because core cloud services weren’t yet at a place where Spotify felt they offered a balance of quality, performance, and cost that would be worth the move. Their decision to do so now shows that times have changed and cloud services have made important strides.
Although it may seem strange to see Spotify use services offered by a competitor — Google Play Music also offers music streaming — such an arrangement isn’t unprecedented. In fact, Netflix recently wrapped up its migration to Amazon’s cloud. The Internet TV network announced the news on its blog in early February, providing another example of such “co-opetition.”
The value that Spotify expects to get now made the move “a no-brainer,” according to Harteau. “At Spotify we are obsessed with providing a streaming experience that feels as though you have all the music in the world on your phone,” he wrote. “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.”
With Spotify’s “large and complex backend,” don’t expect the transition to happen overnight. The company warns that the project will take some time, but ultimately, the move is expected to allow the streaming service to continue to grow, while continuing to offer users the quality music streaming experience they’re used to.
Digital Trends reached out to Google for comment, but had not heard back at time of publishing.
