The sheer volume of activity on Twitter presents significant operational challenges, making independent management complex. Today, Amazon revealed that Twitter has entered into a long-term agreement with AWS to power its real-time timelines. This represents a substantial achievement for Amazon’s cloud computing division.

Although the two organizations have collaborated to some extent for more than ten years, this is the initial instance of Twitter utilizing AWS to support its fundamental timeline functions.

“This broadened use of AWS signifies the first occasion Twitter is employing the public cloud to expand its real-time service. Twitter will utilize the extensive range of AWS features, encompassing computing power, containerization, data storage, and security protocols, to consistently provide a real-time experience with minimal delay, all while continuing to innovate and introduce new functionalities to enhance user interaction with Twitter,” the company stated in its official announcement.

Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief technology officer, views this partnership as a means to broaden and refine the company’s real-time capabilities by leveraging AWS’s global network of data centers to deliver content with greater proximity to users. “Our collaboration with AWS will enhance the experience for Twitter users by allowing us to deliver Tweets from data centers located nearer to our audience, concurrently benefiting from the Arm-based architecture of AWS Graviton2 instances. Beyond facilitating infrastructure scaling, this work with AWS allows us to accelerate feature development through the application of AWS’s diverse and expanding suite of services,” Agrawal explained in a prepared statement.

It is important to recognize that Twitter also maintains a working relationship with Google Cloud. In 2018, the company announced its intention to migrate its Hadoop clusters to the Google Cloud Platform.

This announcement can be seen as further solidifying the position of a market leader, as AWS currently dominates the cloud infrastructure market with approximately 33% of the total market share. Microsoft holds the second position with around 18%, and Google occupies the third position with 9%, as reported by Synergy Research. Amazon’s latest earnings report indicated $11.6 billion in AWS revenue, extrapolating to an annual run rate exceeding $46 billion.