Twitter has announced that it will expand its partnership with Google Cloud. The company will move its offline analytics, data analytics and machine learning processes to Google's data cloud.
Twitter first started working with Google cloud in 2018 as part of their 'Partly Cloudy' strategy. The strategy was an effort by Twitter's engineering team to move some elements of Twitter to the cloud. The partnership seems to have gone well and has led to the expansion of the agreement. Speaking about the agreement Parag Agarwal, CTO at Twitter said, "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,”
Why is Twitter choosing cloud solutions?
Every time a users makes a tweet, likes or retweets content on Twitter, several data points are created. Twitter analyses these data points to get insights and to understand what type of content a user is interested in seeing. Given the scale of activity that takes place on Twitter, a large amount of data needs to be processed. Through this expanded partnership, Twitter will be able to take advantage of Google existing tools and solutions for big data which include: BigQuery, Dataflow, BigTable and machine learning (ML) tools. This will allow Twitter to process data faster, get better insights and improve user experience on the platform. The partnership will also make it easier for data scientists at Twitter to create machine learning models and do predictive analysis.
Google's response to the announcement
When talking to Tech Crunch Sudhir Hasbe, Google Cloud's director said, "“Our platform is serverless and we can help organizations, like Twitter, automatically scale up and down. Twitter can bring massive amounts of data, analyze and get insights without the burden of having to worry about infrastructure or capacity management or how many machines or servers they might need. None of that is their problem.”1
Twitter is not the only company turning to Google Cloud to augment their capabilities. Some other companies that have engaged Google cloud's services during the pandemic include: handmade e-commerce platform Etsy, retailer Bed, Batch and Beyond and home improvement giant Home Depot are some of the other organizations that have engaged Google Cloud's services to ramp up capabilities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the increase in revenue and demand for its services Google Cloud has been reporting losses. Google has disclosed that Google Cloud lost $5.6 billion during the fiscal year 2020.
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Sources:
1. Azevedo, M. 2021, 'Twitter expands Google Cloud partnership to ‘learn more from data, move faster’, Tech Crunch [online] available from: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/twitter-expands-google-cloud-partnership-to-learn-more-from-data-move-faster/ [Feb 2021]