News

MLB Trades AWS for Google Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 03/06/2020

In an about-face, Major League Baseball (MLB) has dumped Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as its cloud provider of choice.

"Google Cloud will become MLB's Official Cloud and Cloud Data and Analytics partner, with MLB's business operations, including Statcast -- the automated tool for analyzing player movements and abilities -- now running on Google Cloud," Google announced Tuesday.

It was a different story in the summer of 2018. At that time, it was AWS crowing about signing the MLB: "Major League Baseball (MLB) has chosen AWS as its official provider for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning workloads. In extending its long-standing relationship, MLB will use AWS machine learning services to continue development of Statcast -- the tracking technology that runs on AWS to analyze player performance for every game -- and develop new technologies to support MLB Clubs in driving innovative fan experiences and engagement across all 30 Major League ballparks."

So those new-wave Statcast baseball statistics like home run exit velocity and "fastest pitches" will now be delivered via GCP instead of AWS.

MLB is moving its cloud and on-premises systems to GCP to take advantage of its machine learning, analytics, application management and storage (data and video) functionality, Google said. That technology will provide Statcast's data analytics technology that features state-of-the-art tracking capabilities. It will apparently also help improve that service, as Google said it "will collaborate closely with MLB to bring the next evolution of Statcast, as well as a number of new technological innovations, to life."

Along with powering Statcast, the Google cloud will continue to provide MLB with Google Ad Manager and Dynamic Ad Insertion functionality, as it has for the past two years.

"MLB's migration to Google Cloud has already resulted in an exponential improvement in analytics and decision making, enabling MLB to provide teams with a unified data plane to enable accelerated decision making," Google said in a statement. "MLB and the teams will maximize the value of Google Cloud capabilities in machine learning, network, and analytics for the development of the fan experience today and beyond."

The customer steal certainly doesn't come at good time for AWS, which is mired in a legal tussle over a $10 billion Department of Defense contract being awarded to Microsoft's Azure cloud instead of AWS, which believes it was clearly the best candidate to get the contract and only lost out because of ill will on the behalf of President Donald Trump toward AWS.