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Twitter Signs Agreement With AWS To Leverage The Public Cloud

Dec. 21, 2020, 6:36 p.m.

TL;DR

Twitter has signed a multi-year agreement with Amazon Web Services to leverage the public cloud infrastructure to support the delivery of millions of tweets every day. The social media giant has, for the first time, turned to the public cloud to enhance its real-time services.

Twitter was forced to limit the launch of Fleets, its story-like feature, which faced a lot of technical issues due to lagging and poor user experience.

Key Facts

1
Twitter will benefit from AWS capabilities’ in computing, containers, storage, and security for reliable delivery of its real-time services.
2
By collaborating with AWS, Twitter would be able to deliver its services with the lowest latency and also develop and deploy new features for improving the platform. AWS would help Twitter scale up or down its real-time workloads without hampering the experience of Twitter users.
3
For powering its Cloud Native workloads, Twitter would use AWS Graviton2-based instances on Amazon EC2. Twitter would also continue to use other AWS features such as Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon CloudFront.
4
With the new collaboration with AWS, Twitter would now be able to avoid problems like the ones it faced with Fleets. Twitter was forced to limit the launch of Fleets, its story-like feature, which faced a lot of technical issues due to lagging and poor user experience.

Details

Twitter and AWS have been working together for over a decade. However, with the latest agreement, Twitter would, for the first time, tap into AWS’s public cloud infrastructure to run its core timelines. It would be able to take advantage of AWS’s network of data centers to deliver content closer to the user. Thus, the new collaboration would open up a range of opportunities for Twitter to grow quickly in areas where they don’t have data centers. It also means that new options and tools could be shipped much faster.

It must be noted that it is not the first time that Twitter has moved a portion of its infrastructure to the cloud. In 2018, it had announced that it would be moving its Hadoop clusters to the Google Cloud Platform.

The new multi-year deal with Twitter would help reinforce AWS’s reputation as the leader in the cloud infrastructure market. AWS holds around 33% of the market share, while Microsoft and Google hold 18% and 9%, respectively.

Yes! Thrilled to strengthen our partnership with @awscloud and continue working towards an even better, lower-latency experience for people using Twitter all around the world! https://t.co/DYYamulG6x
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) December 16, 2020