Why Pandora Is Moving Its Data to the Cloud
Pandora Media has a data management challenge — a huge one. And it’s solving it in the cloud.
Casual fans of the music and entertainment streaming service Pandora know it as a great way to access their favorite songs and other content while discovering new artists. But behind the scenes, at Pandora’s headquarters in Oakland, Calif., is a massive data cluster running in the company’s data center.
Most companies store data. Many are beginning to use insights from their data to make business decisions and drive customer experiences. But since its founding in 2005, Pandora has made data the very heart and soul of its business.
“The core of Pandora is personalization,” explained Brett Uyeshiro, the company’s vice president of platform services, speaking at Google Cloud Next ’19. “The idea of Pandora is you can have a laid-back experience. You give us some cues, and we program a continuous stream of content for you, whether it’s music or nonmusic content like podcasts or comedy. And at the heart of this personalization is our data analytics system. It’s really the workhorse behind it.”
Uyeshiro spoke Wednesay at the massive conference for developers and other users of the Google Cloud Platform, which has attracted 30,000 attendees to San Francisco and concludes April 11.
To date, Pandora has created 13 billion stations for its users, who listen to its content on more than 2,000 different types of devices and generate feedback for the company by giving a digital thumbs up or down to whatever they’re hearing. Pandora uses that feedback to recommend additional content that users might enjoy. Pandora has received and managed roughly 90 billion of these unique feedback points in its history.
To make Pandora work for its 68 million users around the world, its army of engineers and data scientists conduct nonstop analytics on the 7 petabytes of data it has running on 2,700 data nodes.
