Google has gone way beyond just a search engine.
Since its founding in 1998, the company has grown quickly and spread its business to encompass more than just one product. Among the many, includes its business as a cloud service provider.
Historically, Google relies on its own system to run its most-widely used products and services in its number of data centers. For all this time, Google's own system and Google Cloud Platform offering have coexisted separately, and Google has not undertaken the effort to migrate its crucial products to the Google's public cloud.
But the company’s perspective is shifting.
This time, Google is moving part of YouTube's massive infrastructure to its own cloud service at Google Cloud.
“Part of evolving the cloud is having our own services use it more and more, and they are,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud said. “Parts of YouTube are moving to Google Cloud.”
For all this time, enterprise customers may look for cloud service providers, and see Google's offering as one of the several options the market has to give.
With the decision to move part of YouTube to its own cloud service at Google Cloud, Google is like making things easier for its salespeople, who are constantly trying to persuade large companies to use Google's cloud offering, or run their existing apps on the Google Cloud Platform.
By migrating some of YouTube's infrastructure to Google Cloud, Google's salespeople can say that Google Cloud is already trusted by YouTube.
Those customers can be more willing to agree to use Google Cloud Platform, seeing that even Google uses the cloud service to handle its mission-critical workloads.
Among others, this is done so Google can increase its share in the growing cloud computing market, and become less reliant on advertisements appearing on its web search engine and other properties.
In the first quarter of 2021, about 58% of Google’s parent Alphabet revenue came from the Google Search and Other category, which includes its online advertising business. However, during the same period, the Cloud Platform cloud service only brought the company only 7% of revenue.
Despite that, this area is growing fast.
Google sees this growth as a potential, and this is why it's willing to make the investment.
By partially moving YouTube to its own cloud, should help Google grow its revenue in this segment over time.
The change should bring Google more in line with its main U.S. competitors, like Amazon and Microsoft.
YouTube is at this time, the second-largest website on the internet, with more than 2 billion users each month.
Founded in 2005 by Steve Chen and others, Google acquired it in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
Since then, Google has been actively developing and maintaining the video-streaming platform, and managed to evolve the small video streaming platform into an international juggernaut influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities.
YouTube is populated by videos made by YouTube content creators, popularly referred to as YouTubers. These people upload over one hundred hours of content per minute.
And around the world, YouTube's billions of users are watching more than one billion hours of those videos, every single day.