Amazon Talks AWS Success In 2017

AWS now has a $20 billion run rate, with the cloud platform coming off another mightily successful quarter. So much so that Amazon is seeing all of its annual operating income being derived from AWS.

The company already confirmed an uplift of 45% for its cloud arm in Q4 2017.

And according to Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky, there are a number of factors driving these results for the Amazon Web Services platform. He revealed these details last week when outlining the quarterly performance of the company.

“AWS, yes, if you remember last year, we did have price increases in December of last year towards the end. So, it had a partial impact on the quarter. But generally, just strong usage growth — usage growth continues to be strong growing at a higher rate than our revenue growth rate, and customers continued to add workloads and expand.

And as I said, we’re adding new services and features all the time, over 1,400 in 2017 alone. So, it’s a number of factors, I would say. It’s not as simple as lapping a cost error — excuse me, price decrease last year, but we’re very happy with the performance in the AWS business. Now over a $20 billion run rate.”

AWS had an operating income of $1.35 billion for the fourth quarter, with sales coming in at an impressive $5.11 billion.

All this, ultimately, means that the company will have to build upon this success in 2018.

The company is facing intense competition from other cloud platform, most notably Microsoft Azure, which had nearly double the growth figures of AWS. The Redmond based company reported a 98% growth for its platform in Q2 2018, with intelligent cloud revenue increasing 56% to $5.3 billion.

Obviously, this is a number that bundles it all together, but it only shows that Amazon will have an awful lot on its table as it works towards strengthening its lead in this competitive market this year.