Twitter Leverages Google's Data Cloud

February 8, 2021

Google Cloud started a new, multi-year, strategic partnership with Twitter. The company will deepen its initial work with Google and move its offline analytics, data processing, and machine learning workloads to Google's Data Cloud. This will allow Twitter to analyze data faster and improve the experience for people who use the service every day.

Behind every Tweet, Like and Retweet is a series of data points that helps teams understand how people are using the service, and what types of content they might want to see. To process all of this information, Twitter's data platform ingests trillions of events, processes hundreds of petabytes of data, and runs tens of thousands of jobs on over a dozen clusters every day. With this expanded partnership, Twitter is adopting Google's Data Cloud including BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable and machine learning (ML) tools. These tools not only power the company's rapidly growing data ecosystem to enable faster data-informed decisions, but also to enable deeper ML-driven product innovation.

Using Google's Data Cloud, Twitter will be able to democratize data access by offering a range of data processing and machine learning tools to better understand and improve how Twitter features are used. Previously, engineers and data scientists often developed large custom data processing jobs, which can now be queried faster using SQL in BigQuery. This will make it easier for both technical and non-technical teams to study data and accelerate the time to insight.

"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. As Twitter continues to scale, we're excited to partner with Google on more industry-leading technology innovation in the data and machine learning space," said Parag Agrawal, CTO, Twitter.

"Helping customers manage the entire continuum of data - from storage to analytics to AI - is one of our key differentiators at Google Cloud," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "It's been phenomenal to watch this company grow over the years, and we're excited to partner with Twitter to innovate for the future and deliver the best experience possible for the people that use Twitter every day."

This new strategic expanded partnership extends the companies' 2018 deal, when Twitter tapped Google Cloud to move Hadoop clusters to Google Cloud Platform as a part of Twitter's cloud strategy, dubbed "Partly Cloudy."