Twitter have recently moved their infrastructure into the cloud under the vast online giant Amazon Web Services (AWS). They have been brought on to scope including the delivery of timelines in a multi-year agreement in which Twitter will leverage the huge tech giant’s infrastructure.

Some of the main elements that AWS will help deliver for Twitter include a new content delivery network service called CloudFront; and in addition to this there is also the Graviton2 based instances on EC2 that will also include containers to help with Twitter’s infrastructure. The second of these new dependencies seems to be a new development for the social network company.

Whether this has come from the necessity of growth that has come out of the pandemic, Twitter in its partnership with AWS will together “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” – this comes directly from the press release announcing the new partnership and really points to the importance of enabling an agile service that is reliant on minimal downtime, ease of access and rapid scalability.

Parag Agrawal, the chief technology officer for Twitter explained recently in a statement:

“We are excited to work with AWS to expand the infrastructure Twitter uses to serve the public conversation as we grow globally. 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 architecture of AWS Graviton2 instances.”

This further explains the benefits of handling services within the cloud and ensuring that the data is readily available for its users as easily as possible through the use of data centres locally to any particular user at any one time. This is because the expectation of users of a social media platform that’s is, in its own nature; rapid and in the moment, the speed of the user experience is much more important. 

Parag Agarwal continued: “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.”

This specifically points at the ability of Twitter to quickly roll out new features. One thing that they have been criticised for in the past is the fact that news of their new features spreads quicker than the user adoption and uptake – for a company that is as “real-time” as Twitter this is to be expected, but it’s important for them to ensure a crisp, consistent experience across all users.

AWS also explained how Twitter’s expansion into the cloud pointed to the first time that the company has started to leverage public cloud to scale the real-time services previously mentioned. 

While in this particular example is a tech giant moving its database and infrastructure to leverage that of another tech behemoth in Amazon Web Services, there are to be lessons learned for business of all sizes in the reasoning behind Twitter’s decision to move. For example, ensuring seamless experiences and processes for all of your clients is paramount to ensuring a brilliant customer experience; and the ease of use of your products, services or simply even website – this all adds up to making your customers continue to return.

In addition to this we can also take into account the fact that the ease of access to this data whether internally or externally can vastly benefit multiple stakeholders. The ability to access workflows and user data by staff from anywhere has lead companies like Twitter in this instance; and many others across the world of all sizes, to work flexibly and remotely. It also allows the access to remote working from anywhere in the world meaning that talent pools open up to businesses from all around. You would expect that this may eventually mean that ‘talent markets’ wherever your business is physically located is a thing of the past – with the business and its workloads based in the cloud; theoretically you can now have a workforce based anywhere – and this means you get the best staff without the constraints of location.