Google shifts parts of YouTube to Google Cloud Platform

Google is moving parts of YouTube to its cloud service.

The video platform, which has 2 billion monthly active users and is the second most-visited website on the internet, currently exists solely within Google’s internal data centre infrastructure. 

The move comes at a time when Google is looking to increase its presence in the cloud computing market, and better compete with Amazon and Microsoft in this field. Google is also shifting its focus to the cloud in order to be less reliant on digital advertising as a revenue generator.

While the Google Cloud Platform has operated since 2008, the company has historically run its services like YouTube and the Google search engine from its data centres separate from the cloud. 

According to CNBC, the move is also being considered as a potential sales tool for Google as it attempts to sell large companies on building on Google Cloud Platform. That the platform can handle the workload of YouTube will be a selling point as a major competitor – especially as AWS has suffered major outages in the past year which have seen apps and services like Adobe Spark, Flickr, Roku and The Washington Post knocked offline for an extended period.

In the most recent market figures from Gartner in 2019, Google held 5% of the cloud infrastructure market compared to Microsoft’s 18% and Amazon’s 45%.