• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 15, 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has inked a multiyear deal with Twitter to support timelines, providing the infrastructure to deliver millions of daily Tweets through the company’s cloud infrastructure.

The agreement, announced Tuesday, marks the first time that Twitter has leveraged the public cloud to scale its real-time service.

Amazon will take on the responsibility to compute, contain, store, secure and reliably deliver the real-time service with the lowest latency, while continuing to develop and deploy new features to improve how people use Twitter.

Parag Agrawal, chief technology officer at Twitter, believes the collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people using Twitter by enabling the company to serve Tweets from data centers closer to users while leveraging AWS Graviton2's Arm-based architecture.

Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, which corresponds to more than 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year, according to Internet Live Stats.

The new agreement builds on more than a decade-long collaboration, where AWS continues to provide Twitter with storage, computation, database, and content delivery services to support its distribution of images, videos and advertising content.

AWS is known for having a strong security features to prevent hackers from stealing or disturbing the data, but as Twitter pushes to become a tool for advertising, it needs something more.

Jonathan Lewis, senior director, product manager, Twitter, is committed to creating an environment where everyone -- including advertisers -- can participate and engage safely.“We know there is a lot of work to be done to achieve this, and we are actively working with key industry partners to advance brand safety as a central component of the advertising and measurement solutions on Twitter,” he wrote.

In the post, he notes a partnership with DoubleVerify (DV) and Integral Ad Science (IAS) to strengthen viewability measurement standards and provide independent reporting on the context in which ads appear on Twitter.

“We see this as an opportunity to build solutions that will give advertisers a better understanding of the types of content that appear adjacent to their ads, helping them make informed decisions to reach their marketing goals,” he wrote. “These solutions will complement our existing third-party viewability measurement solutions with DV and IAS.”