Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos celebrated his company’s cloud business of a decade this week by stating that Amazon Web Services (AWS), is growing at a faster pace than its parent company at 10 years.
In a letter to shareholders, Bezos stated that Amazon Web Services has reached $10 billion in annual sales. He did this at a speed even faster than Amazon.
Bezos has every reason to spotlight AWS. Amazon’s cloud unit has been the fastest-growing business in the company’s history, surpassing bread-and-butter retail sectors. This is 10 years after it first appeared with the Simple Storage Service (S3)).
Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings report was disappointing. AWS provided the only bright spot. Revenue rose by 69 percent year over year, while operating income rose by 186 percent. (Amounting to $2.4 Billion and $687 M, respectively).
Bezos stated in the letter that AWS is now 10 years older than Amazon.com and is growing at a faster pace.
He cited AWS’ ever-growing list of offerings as a key driver for that growth, noting AWS had released 722 new features in 2015, an increase of 40% over 2014.
“AWS is composed of many small teams with single-threaded owner, which allows for rapid innovation. Bezos stated that the team releases new functionality almost every day across 70 services and that customers simply’show up’ with the new functionality — there’s no upgrading.
The letter also shared other milestones and statistics about AWS. Bezos stated that AWS is used by more than 1 million customers and offers 70 distinct services. Its footprint includes 33 datacenter availability zones distributed across 12 geographical regions around the globe.
The Aurora database engine, which was made generally available last year by AWS, is now the fastest-growing product in AWS’ history. Redshift managed data warehouse service is next.
Bezos stated that AWS had lowered its prices 51x in response to the ongoing cloud price war between Google, Microsoft, and AWS. This was “in many cases prior to there being any competitive pressure to do this.”
Bezos stated that “[T]he service will only get better from here.” “As the team continues to innovate, we’ll offer more capabilities to builders to build unfettered. It will become easier to collect, store, and analyze data. We’ll continue adding geographic locations and we’ll continue seeing growth in mobile and connected’ device apps. It’s likely that companies will opt for the cloud over having their own data centers in the future.
