Twitter moves to AWS for real-time scaling to expand public cloud play


The news keeps coming from Amazon Web Services (AWS) during the month of re:Invent, with the company securing Twitter as a customer to deliver its timelines.

In the multi-year agreement, Twitter will leverage AWS infrastructure and services, from content delivery network service Amazon CloudFront, to Graviton2-based instances on EC2, as well as containers. The latter appear to be new developments while the former is a continuation.

The companies will ‘create an architecture that extends Twitter’s on-premises infrastructure to enable them to seamlessly run and scale the real-time service globally, increase its reliability using AWS’s fault-tolerant infrastructure, and rapidly move new features into production around the world’, in the words of the press materials.

“We are excited to work with AWS to expand the infrastructure Twitter uses to serve the public conversation as we grow globally,” said Parag Agrawal, Twitter chief technology officer in a statement. “The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve tweets from data centres closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecgture of AWS Graviton2 instances.

“In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS’s diverse and growing portfolio of services,” Agrawal added.

AWS noted that Twitter’s expansion ‘marks the first time [the company] is leveraging the public cloud to scale their real-time service.’ Yet Twitter has previously been a customer of Google Cloud, utilising Google Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Cloud Dataproc to run Hadoop clusters. The Google Cloud Twitter customer page is no longer available, instead taking users to the overall customer site, but was accessible as of a month ago.

re:Invent continues until December 18, as well as between January 12 and 14. Read about the main announcements from Andy Jassy’s keynote here, as well as the primary machine learning (ML) updates from sister publication AI News here.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

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Author

  • James Bourne

    James has a passion for how technologies influence business and has several Mobile World Congress events under his belt. James has interviewed a variety of leading figures in his career, from former Mafia boss Michael Franzese, to Steve Wozniak, and Jean Michel Jarre. James can be found tweeting at @James_T_Bourne.

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