Twitter has signed a new hosting deal with Amazon Web Services, which will enable it to utilize the capacity of AWS to improve the app’s performance, and the services it’s able to provide.
As reported by Bloomberg:
“Under a multiyear deal announced on Tuesday, Twitter will use the Amazon unit to provide “global cloud infrastructure to deliver Twitter timelines,” supplementing the social media company’s own computing capacity. The companies didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal.”
That should help Twitter avoid similar issues to what users recently experienced with the roll-out of its Stories-like Fleets.
We’re slowing down the rollout of Fleets to fix some performance and stability problems. If you don’t have the feature yet, you may not get it for a few more days.
We love that so many people are using Fleets and want to ensure we’re providing the best experience for everyone.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 19, 2020
Twitter was forced to ease back the launch of Fleets due to major issues with system load, which lead to significant lag and a poor user experience. Those issues have been sorted now, but the new arrangement with AWS could help Twitter avoid the same with future releases and updates.
The deal could also help Twitter roll-out new features and tools faster – according to Matt Garman, the sales and marketing chief of AWS, Twitter’s increased reliance on the cloud “should save money, free up developers to work on other products, and allow the social media company to grow more quickly in areas where they don’t have data centers”.
That could open up a range of new possibilities for Twitter, specifically in regards to growth in new regions. But it could also mean that new options and tools are shipped faster, and it won’t experience issues like the aforementioned challenges with the initial roll-out of Fleets.
But then again, for that to be truly valuable in this sense, Twitter needs new products and tools to ship, which hasn’t always been its strong suit. But with Twitter recently acquiring multi-participant streaming app Squad, and possibly looking to make changes to its current live-streaming platform Periscope, this new deal could be aligned with a renewed push into live video, and engaging on the platform in new ways via video connection.
We’ll have to wait and see, but it seems like this could be the precursor to significant new updates for the Twitter experience.
