Twitter chooses AWS to provide its global cloud infrastructure

Twitter will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its provider of global cloud infrastructure to deliver Twitter timelines, it was announced today.

Under a two-year deal signed by the two companies, Twitter will leverage AWS's infrastructure for the first time to deliver millions of tweets a day, in an effort to scale their service in 2021.

While this marks the first time that Twitter has utilised the public cloud to scale their real-time service, it comes as an extension of the two companies' decade-long collaboration, throughout which AWS has provided Twitter with storage, compute, database, and content delivery services to support its distribution of images, videos, ad content and more.

"We are excited to work with AWS to expand the infrastructure Twitter uses to serve the public conversation as we grow globally," says Twitter chief technology officer Parag Agrawal.

"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 will create an architecture that extends the former's on-premises infrastructure to enable them to run and scale the real-time service globally, increase its reliability, and move new features into production around the world.

Twitter will also take advantage of AWS Graviton2-based instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to power its cloud-based workloads, and use AWS container services to develop and deploy new features and applications consistently across its hybrid infrastructure.

In addition, Twitter will continue to use AWS services such as Amazon CloudFront (AWS's fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs with low latency and high transfer speeds to customers globally) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS's key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale).

"Twitter's decision to rely on AWS infrastructure and services for its real-time workloads will help them instantly scale their global footprint up and down without ever compromising the experience for people who use Twitter," says Amazon Web Services vice president, sales and marketing Matt Garman.

"By using AWS container services to create a seamless hybrid on-premises and cloud environment, Twitter can innovate and deliver new experiences quickly and cost-effectively.