Meta names "long-term strategic" cloud provider
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Meta names "long-term strategic" cloud provider

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In news that will surprise almost nobody, Meta has confirmed it will continue to use AWS as its long-term cloud provider as it scales R&D, drives operational efficiency... and looks for more acquisitions.

Meta said it will broaden its use of AWS compute, storage, databases, and security services "to provide privacy, reliability, and scale in the cloud".

However, the interesting part is that Meta wants its relationship with AWS to make future acquisitions easier – even if that does bolster the dominance of AWS in the world of cloud services. How regulators will view this remains to be seen, but Meta said it will run third-party collaborations in AWS and "use the cloud to support acquisitions of companies that are already powered by AWS". In short, Meta doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes made when Facebook acquired WhatsApp and migrated it from AWS to its own infrastructure.

Side note: GIPHY is also on AWS, although that acquisition is being reversed by regulators.

Further, Meta said it will also use AWS’s compute services to drive its R&D around AI for the Meta AI group. Meta and AWS will also work together to improve the performance for customers running PyTorch – the opensource ML framework – on AWS. This would bring deep learning models from research into production faster and easier and therefore "accelerate how developers build, train, deploy, and operate AI and ML models".

“Meta and AWS have been expanding our collaboration over the last five years,” said Kathrin Renz, VP of business development and industries at Amazon Web Services, Inc.

“With this agreement, AWS will continue to help Meta support research and development, drive innovation, and collaborate with third parties and the open-source community at scale. Customers can rely on Meta and AWS to collaborate on PyTorch, making it easier for them to build, train, and deploy deep learning models on AWS.”

Jason Kalich, VP of production engineering at Meta added: “We are excited to extend our strategic relationship with AWS to help us innovate faster and expand the scale and scope of our research and development work.

“The global reach and reliability of AWS will help us continue to deliver innovative experiences for the billions of people around the world that use Meta products and services and for customers running PyTorch on AWS.”

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