Spotify's Latest Strategy Change Could Help Google

Google, which reports under Alphabet Inc

, got a big fillip as music streaming service Spotify chose to adopt the search giant's Cloud Platform to power its backend infrastructure. This is considered as a major boost to Google's cloud platform that competes with players such as Amazon Web Services and and Microsoft Azure. Spotify buys or lease data-center space, server hardware and networking gear as the earlier core cloud services were not at a level of quality, performance and cost that would make cloud a significantly better option for the company in the long run. But, in recent times, many firms are taking the Cloud route as the storage, compute and network services available from cloud providers are of high quality, and come at a low cost as what the traditional approach provides. "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," Spotify said in a blog post. Moreover, cloud is a more feasible option as its business is growing quickly in users, along with markets and features. As of June 2015, Spotify had more than 75 million active users, including about 20 million paid users. The company hosts more than 2 billion playlists and gives consumers access to more than 30 million songs. For storage, Spotify is now implementing Google Cloud Datastore and Google Cloud Bigtable. This rich fabric of storage services lets engineers work on complex back end logic, instead of focusing on how to store the data and maintain databases. Spotify is also deploying Google's Cloud Networking services, such as Direct Peering, Cloud VPN and Cloud Router, to transfer petabytes of data. This results in a fast, reliable and secure experience for users around the globe. On the data side of things, the company is adopting Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Dataproc. What makes the deal interesting is that it helps Spotify to compete better against the Google's own music streaming service. But Google is not alone in this list. Netflix, Inc.

, which competes with Amazon Prime Video, have completed its migration to AWS. Netflix began the migration to AWS cloud in August of 2008, when it experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to its members. Elasticity of the cloud allows the company to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes, making such an expansion possible. Netflix also said cloud costs per streaming start ended up being a fraction of those in the data center.