Amazon is a huge player in the world of cloud computing and it’s just made a big win by landing a portion of Twitter’s business. The company just signed a deal with AWS to run its core timelines, a move that will help it scale its services and deliver real-time updates at a higher rate than ever before.
AWS and Twitter have been working together for over a decade, but this is the first time the two companies will work in tandem to power the company’s real-time service. AWS will leverage its breadth of capabilities in compute, storage and security to deliver a high-performance, scalable solution.
How AWS got started
Back in the early 2000s, Amazon was struggling with a variety of scaling issues. It needed to build strong internal systems that would allow it to scale its business without compromising performance or reliability. The team spent a lot of time building these core infrastructure services, including the ability to scale compute and storage out to match demand.
Andy Jassy, now CEO of AWS, told TechCrunch that he and the rest of the team developed those core systems out of necessity. As he said, the company wasn’t able to articulate what they were trying to do when they built those systems, but he says it became apparent that they had something unique that nobody else had.
The company is on a run rate of about $80 billion in revenue and that hasn’t slowed down despite the global economic slowdown, currency problems and other challenges facing many businesses. AWS has also been able to avoid the cuts that are plaguing so many other companies, which is something the cloud business can be especially proud of.
