Mumbai, India (CU)_ Google revealed on Thursday that it has signed a multi-year contract with Twitter, adding to the cloud more analytics, data processing and machine learning tasks from the social media platform. Since 2018, when it migrated its cold storage and Hadoop clusters to GCP, Twitter has been using the Google Cloud Platform. To help the social media firm with data processing and analytics based on machine learning tools, Twitter is turning to Google.
Twitter Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal spoke about the Twitter Google relationship. He said in a statement, “Our initial partnership with Google Cloud has been successful and enabled us to enhance the productivity of our engineering teams. Building on this relationship and Google’s technologies will allow us to learn more from our data, move faster and serve more relevant content to the people who use our service every day.” In an earlier statement, Agrawal had said, “Architecturally, we will also be able to separate compute and storage for this class of Hadoop workloads, which has a number of long-term scaling and operational benefits”.
Trillions of events are run by the Twitter data platforms daily. The site processes hundreds of data petabytes and runs tens of thousands of jobs on more than a dozen clusters. The business plans to provide more input out of its data to both technical and non-technical departments. Twitter intends to make use of the prominent Google tools such as BigQuery, Dataflow and Cloud Bigtable to accomplish this task. Previously, custom data processing jobs were created by Twitter engineers and data scientists. This migration would allow for faster capacity provision, increased flexibility, access to a wider tool and service ecosystem, security improvements, and improved capacity for disaster recovery.
Despite the company’s revenues from Google Cloud rising 47 percent in Q4 2020, the company still recorded an operating loss of $1.24 billion. Multi-year agreements like the one with Twitter can further boost the market place of Google Cloud. While Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure now have only over half of the market, overall industry spending on cloud infrastructure continues to increase. Data solutions and trusted infrastructure from the Google Cloud Platform can provide Twitter with the technological stability and quality that its platform requires.
