Spotify announces partnership with Google Cloud

Spotify has partnered with Google to shift its technical infrastructure to the Google Cloud platform. Both Spotify and Google made the announcement on 23 February.

Spotify, who had till now been handling its hardware technical issues by leasing or buying data center space from leading network providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), had briefly toyed with the idea of developing its own server farms. However, the partnership announcement with Google has revealed the firm's "guts that power the Spotify service" will henceforth be overseen in the Google Cloud platform.

Spotify VP of engineering and infrastructure Nicholas Harteau said: "Today we are announcing that we're working with the Google Cloud Platform team to provide platform infrastructure for Spotify, everywhere. 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. Good infrastructure isn't just about keeping things up and 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 posted a blog announcement in which it said: "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. The company split their migration to Cloud Platform into two streams: a services track and a data track."

The move, which according to Spotify is a "big deal", will involve the ginormous undertaking of both the companies working together to move all of Spotify's backend operations to Google's cloud platform.

With the impending launch of Spotify's video streaming services, the new partnership indicates the company's resolve to expand services. IBTimes UK reported in January that the music streaming service was slated to soon roll-out video streaming services to the UK, US, Sweden and Germany.