Google LLC’s cloud business just marked what is perhaps one of its highest-profile customer wins in recent memory.

In a blog post published this afternoon, Twitter Inc. Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal revealed that the social network plans to migrate parts of its infrastructure to the Google Cloud Platform. According to the executive, the move is designed to address the “growing needs of our service,” particularly around analytics.

The project has two main focus points. Twitter plans to migrate cold-storage systems it uses to house infrequently accessed data along with several deployments of Hadoop, the popular open-source analytics framework. Agrawal said the clusters host more than 300 petabytes of data across tens of thousands of servers.

That would suggest that the value of Twitter’s cloud deal with Google is substantial. However, the social giant told TechCrunch that the systems being migrated constitute only a relatively small portion of its total infrastructure footprint. Most of the company’s systems are reportedly set to remain in its own data centers.

As for the technical aspect of the migration, Agrawal expects that adopting Google’s cloud will provide several operational benefits in the long run. “This migration, when complete, will enable faster capacity provisioning; increased flexibility; access to a broader ecosystem of tools and services; improvements to security; and enhanced disaster recovery capabilities,” the executive wrote.

For Google, the agreement represents much more than just another contract. The fact that a company as prominent as Twitter chose its platform amounts to a big victory over Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., its top rivals in the public cloud.

Twitter’s announcement of the migration comes just three days after Google inked a cloud deal with another leading tech firm, Fitbit Inc. As part of the project, the fitness tracker maker will use the search giant’s platform to process biometric readings collected by its devices and combine them with electronic health records for medical purposes.

Image: Google