For the first time, Twitter is tapping into the public cloud by picking Amazon Web Services to deliver its services in real time. Twitter has employed its own data centers over the years, but the multi-year deal gives Twitter access to AWS' global cloud infrastructure to deliver its timelines.
Moving to the public cloud puts Twitter's services closer to its end users, which improves latency for a better customer experience. AWS' public cloud also allows Twitter to scale up or scale down its server capacity as needed.
"Twitter will rely on the breadth and depth of AWS, including capabilities in compute, containers, storage, and security, to reliably deliver the real-time service with the lowest latency, while continuing to develop and deploy new features to improve how people use Twitter," according to the press release.
The new agreement built on the companies’ more than decade-long collaboration of AWS providing Twitter with storage, compute, database, and content delivery services to support its distribution of images, videos and ad content.
The two companies will also develop and deploy new features to improve how Twitter's customers use the service.
Twitter and AWS will team up on creating an architecture for Twitter’s on-premises infrastructure to enable it to run and scale its real-time service globally, increase its reliability using AWS’s fault-tolerant infrastructure, and put features into production globally at a faster rate.
Twitter will use AWS Graviton2-based instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to power its cloud-based workloads as well as AWS container services to develop and deploy new features and applications consistently across its hybrid infrastructure.
Twitter will still use AWS services such as Amazon CloudFront—which is AWS’s fast content delivery network service that delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs with low latency and high transfer speeds to customers globally—and Amazon DynamoDB. DynamoDB is AWS’s key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at scale.
"We are excited to work with AWS to expand the infrastructure Twitter uses to serve the public conversation as we grow globally," said Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, in a statement. "The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture 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."
Twitter and AWS didn't disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Twitter was a huge customer win for AWS. AWS has far and away been the leader in the public cloud space, but Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and IBM have been diligently working to close the gap.
According to an October report by Synergy Research Group, Amazon and Microsoft accounted for over half of the worldwide cloud market, with AWS' market share remaining at its long-standing mark of around 33%, while Microsoft’s share was over 18%.
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