Google announced on February 4 that it is expanding its partnership with Twitter, signing a multi-year agreement . In this way, Google will bring most of the social media company's analytics, data processing and machine learning to the cloud. Twitter has been using Google Cloud Platform since 2018. Specifically, that year, the social media company moved its cold storage and Hadoop clusters to Google Cloud Platform.
Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal said in a statement: “Our initial partnership with Google Cloud was successful and allowed us to improve the productivity of our technical teams. Expanding this relationship and Google’s technologies will allow us to learn more from data , move faster, and deliver more relevant content to the people who use our service every day.”
Twitter’s data platform ingests trillions of events a day, processes hundreds of petabytes of data, and runs tens of thousands of jobs. Twitter wants both technical and non-technical teams to get more insights from its data. To achieve this, the company plans to use Google tools like BigQuery, Dataflow, and Cloud Bigtable. Previously, Twitter engineers and data scientists would develop custom data processing jobs.
According to ZDNet, while Google Cloud revenue grew 47% in Q4 2020, the company still had an operating loss of $1.24 billion. Therefore, multi-year deals, like the one with Twitter, will help strengthen Google Cloud's position in the market.
Industry spending on cloud infrastructure continues to grow, although Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure currently hold just over half of the market. Google's market share, according to research firm Canalys, stands at 7%.
