Spotify are partnering with Google to transfer their infrastructure over to Cloud servers – “This is a big deal”.

As cloud servers continue to improve in high quality, performance and low cost Spotify have decided to move away from their “traditional approach”. Citing a significant increase in the quality of cloud providers in recent years Spotify are moving their core infrastructure over to Google’s online servers.

Until now Spotify have been buying/leasing data-center space, server hardware and networking gear to provide their services but, according to their blog post: “We occasionally asked ourselves: do we really need to do all this stuff?” Thanks to the ever-increasing capabilities of cloud servers Spotify decided they don’t need it, opting for the complicated process of switching servers with an ultimately promising payoff – I’m taking Spotify’s word on that.

As Spotify say themselves, however, cloud hosting is a highly competitive space, especially as it’s prominence continues to rise in online business as well as personal use. Spotify’s vice president of Engineering and Infrastructure, Nicholas Harteau said: “It’s a competitive space and we expect the big players to be battling it out for the foreseeable future.” So don’t get too cushty with Spotify yet, Google.

Spotify will continue to use Amazon’s cloud services for music files, as Amazon remain the leaders in cloud hosting, but opted for Google’s cloud for their core infrastructure. Harteau explained, saying: “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 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.”

The Google team that Spotify will now work with is led by Diane Greene, head of enterprise cloud business at Google since her startup Beebop was acquired by Google in November. Though you, the user, will probably notice little to no difference this partnership is sure to make life easier for the engineers over at Spotify.

You can keep up to date with their experiences on Spotify’s engineering blog. “We’re pretty excited about our Googley future and hope you’ll find it interesting too”.