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Music streaming service Spotify’s more than 20 million paying customers around the world will soon have their music delivered from Google’s cloud infrastructure.
In a major win for Google, Spotify has decided to move off its home-built technology infrastructure to Google’s Cloud Computing Platform. The migration will take place over the next several months and involve two separate projects—one to migrate Spotify services to Google cloud and the other to migrate its massive data stacks.
Spotify’s plans call for the company to move its products from a multitude of microservices running on on-premise data centers to Google’s cloud using Google’s cloud Compute Engine and Storage services, Guillaume Leygues, lead sales engineer at Google’s Cloud Platform group, wrote in a blog post.
As part of its migration, Spotify has already begun implementing Google’s Cloud Datastore NoSQL database and Google’s Cloud Bigtable database service for big data workloads, Leygues said. The music streaming service has also begun rolling out Google’s Direct Peering, Cloud Router and Cloud VPN to facilitate the transfer of petabytes worth of data from its internal data centers to the Google cloud.
Direct Peering is a service that allows Google’s cloud customers to tie their business networks to Google’s own and exchange data via a peering connection. Google does not charge companies for establishing a direct peering connection with its network and neither does it charge for ingress traffic. The company’s Cloud VPN service will allow Spotify to connect its network with Google’s cloud and exchange data via a secure VPN connection.
Under the data migration effort, Spotify will discard its existing Hadoop, MapReduce and Hive based technology stack and move to an entirely new one featuring Google technologies, such as its Cloud Pub/Sub messaging middleware and Cloud Dataflow for batch and streaming processing applications.
Spotify, which maintains more than 2 billion playlists and some 30 million songs, will also use Google BigQuery and Cloud Dataproc to run complex queries and interactive analyses on its really massive data sets.
Spotify represents a substantial win for Google, which has been trying to position its cloud computing services as a lower-cost, higher-performing alternative to better established services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. According to Leygues, Spotify chose Google after carefully vetting all the offerings in the cloud computing market.
Google currently ranks behind AWS, Microsoft and IBM in the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services, according to the most recent numbers from Synergy Research Group.
AWS continues to dominate the segment with worldwide market share of 31 percent in 2015. Its next closest rival is Microsoft whose Azure stack accounted for 9 percent, followed by IBM with a 7 percent share, Synergy’s numbers showed.
Google, which grew its presence in the cloud infrastructure services market by more than 108 percent in 2015, has about 4 percent global share or the same as that of Salesforce.com. The only company that grew faster in this segment last year was Microsoft. Together, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Google and Salesforce account for more than 50 percent of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market, which Synergy pegged at $23 billion in 2015.