Spotify is moving, sort of. Until now, the company has maintained its own data servers, leasing space near listeners so that it can stream music as quickly as desired. Now the company is saying goodbye to that approach and saying hello to the Google Cloud Platform.

Spotify views this as an opportunity to cut costs and save effort. Google's data platform lets the music streaming company focus on what it likes doing and leaving the boring system administration to someone else's engineers.

This move is not unlike Netflix's own recent move. Little more than a week ago, the company announced that it had fully migrated its product to Amazon Web Services. Though, it's worth pointing out that Amazon's product has significantly more market share.

Consolidation is good for business, but this transition does come with risks. Now a Google outage has the possibility of taking Spotify down with it, much like how Netflix is one of many sites that may go down whenever Amazon has issues, something that has happened before.

The Google Cloud Platform offers hosting on the same infrastructure Google uses for its own products. The company has remarkable uptime, but even its services are unavailable every now and then. That also makes Spotify one more thing you have to count on Google to deliver.

Spotify hasn't completed the transition just yet. Given the size of the company's backend, this could take quite some time.

Source: Spotify