Twitter is moving some infrastructure to the Google Cloud Platform

Twitter is moving parts of its infrastructure out of physical data centers and onto the Google Cloud Platform. To be clear, the bulk of the social company’s infrastructure will remain in its data centers, but specific workloads will now take advantage of Google’s cloud.

Specifically, Twitter is migrating its cold data storage and flexible compute Hadoop clusters. The advantages will thus be around the productivity of the company’s engineering teams working with Twitter’s data platform, not so much what the average Twitter user experiences.

The Hadoop compute system is the core of Twitter’s data platform. The company runs multiple large Hadoop clusters, including among the biggest in the world — Twitter’s Hadoop file systems host “more than 300PB of data across tens of thousands of servers.” In other words, the infrastructure is getting unwieldy, and Twitter has decided it needs a better way to keep up with the growth.

The migration isn’t going to happen quickly, and Twitter didn’t get a timeframe for when it might be complete. But Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal did touch on the benefits the company is hoping to reap.

“This migration, when complete, will enable faster capacity provisioning; increased flexibility; access to a broader ecosystem of tools and services; improvements to security; and enhanced disaster recovery capabilities,” Agrawal 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.”

And of course, Google is thrilled to have Twitter as a customer.

“There is strong alignment with Twitter’s engineering strategy to meet the demands of its platform and the services Google Cloud offers at a global scale,” Google Cloud CTO Brian Stevens said in a statement. “Google Cloud Platform’s data solutions and trusted infrastructure will provide Twitter with the technical flexibility and consistency that its platform requires, and we look forward to an ongoing technical collaboration with their team.”