Twilio Advances Cloud Communications

Twilio announced today at a Twilio SIGNALS 2017 conference that it will become one of the first providers of communications software to take advantage of a serverless computing framework that promises to eliminate the need to configure Web infrastructure in support of Twilio communications software.

In addition, Twilio announced Twilio Proxy, a new set of declarative application programming interfaces (APIs) that developers can invoke to set up a private communications channel between users of mobile computing devices. Like all Twilio services, the APIs and application logic runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Pat Malatack, vice president of product for Twilio, says Twilio Functions makes use of a serverless computing service to enable developers to dynamically invoke additional compute resources as needed without having to worry about provisioning additional virtual machine and storage capacity.

“It allows developers to spend their time on creating a great customer experience,” says Malatack.

As communications services continue to evolve in the age of the cloud, it’s starting to become apparent that multiple forms of communications involving text, audio and video are increasingly being embedded into applications. Rather than requiring end users to fire up a separate application, the goal is to enable end users to communicate with one another within the context of the applications they are using to accomplish a specific task.

It’s unclear what this shift in the way communications services are delivered will ultimately mean for standalone unified communications applications. But the one thing that is clear is that multiple forms of communications channels are increasingly become just another application feature.