Yeah but they use GCS for auth, moderation, and caching. They apparently haven’t been paying Google since April and the contract expired June 30th

For someone that portrays they know so much about the agreements and deadlines you missed this article. It doesn’t help your narrative.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/twitter-r...

Is using the word “narrative” the new hot thing we’re doing to try to discredit someone we disagree with? It’s so difficult to keep track.

It's been hot for a while now. "Narrative" and "agenda" / "pushing an agenda."

"Twitter and AWS signed a five-and-a-half-year contract in 2020, which AWS is not willing to renegotiate."

https://gritdaily.com/twitter-owes-aws-millions/

Twitter.com and the associated user-facing services do not run on AWS.

While it looks like they never started the move over to AWS, the press release makes it sound like they do use some AWS services.

> In addition, Twitter will continue to use AWS services such as Amazon CloudFront (AWS’s fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs with low latency and high transfer speeds to customers globally) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS’s key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale).

I worked there. Services running on GCP are a significant part of the internal service infra (ml platform, etc.) and it's no impossible that the abrupt loss of GCP would cause user-facing problems. The GCP spend was many, many times the AWS spend. Unless things changed since last November, AWS is not a meaningful part of the internal or user-facing infra.

With respect to DynamoDB specifically, Twitter has its own custom distributed key-value store: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-... that twitter.com itself runs on.

Thanks for weighing in with some actual first-hand knowledge. It is appreciated.

The latest on cloud hosting is from a week ago, and I'm guessing you don't have any more recent info than this:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-resumes-paying-go...

Correct, no more recent (or less public) info than that. Like I say, losing GCP could cause problems users notice, but sounds like that’s not going to happen.

And yet they also host with AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle. Cloud people take note: this is what lock-in looks like, and it's coming to a place near you.

No, this has nothing to do with lock-in. This has done nothing to do with decision making that subverts good engineering.

Cloud agnostic is hard