Spotify Case Study
[pic 1]Company BackgroundSpotify is an online music, podcast and video streaming service provider to over 16 million licensed songs and it was officially launched on 7 October 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden by a start-up company called Spotify AB. As of today, Spotify’s services are widely available across most parts of America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and part of Asia. The application for Spotify is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux operating systems for computers, including multiple mobile devices and tablet platforms such as Android, iOS and Windows Phone. While the application is available to download for free, the users of the application are given the option to choose the following packages:Spotify Free$0.00/per monthSpotify Premium$9.99/per monthFeature(s):Shuffle playFeature(s):Shuffle playAds freeUnlimited skipsListen offlinePlay any trackHigh quality audio(Source: Spotify – Music for Everyone)The Needs of Using AWS Cloud ComputingAs Spotify is an online music provider, its main goal is to ensure that users of the application are able to listen and enjoy their favourite songs wherever and whenever they desire. Therefore, the challenge it faced was to store and catalogue all the songs in its database. The additional challenge faced by Spotify is that the company adds over 20,000 tracks a day to its catalogue and it requires additional storage space without causing long lead times. Then, there is also the need to meet the legal requirements set and adopted in various countries which Spotify chose to operate.
Spotify resorted to use cloud storage to solve its storage and cataloguing needs and more specifically it chose to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).Further challenges face by Spotify is the need to provide Spotify’s application and software updates to its user as it engages with huge volume content in Amazon S3. For Spotify to solve this challenge, it chose to adopt Amazon CloudFront.AWS Features/Modules/Systems in the CompanyOne of the main feature available within Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is the AWS Storage Gateway which provides a hybrid storage that allows for on-premises application to seamlessly use the AWS Cloud Storage to access the millions of songs from Spotify’s database stored within Amazon S3. Besides providing a seamless access, the AWS Storage Gateway also allows Spotify to backup and archive its data, disaster recovery in-case of any serious system crash, cloud bursting, storage tiering and data migration. In order to understand this amazing feature of the AWS Storage Gateway, we will begin to look into its key features of storage classes and bucket policies which forms the fundamental of all these amazing services to be chosen and used by Spotify.