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AWS performed extremely strongly last year. Once again, they hit the record. The public cloud service providers -in general- performed very well in 2017, all the big players increased their revenues with double digits. Buzz around cloud remains on the high level. It seems that cloud services are not appealing just for certain industry but all of them. Fast paced business environments are more and more depending on dynamic possibilities of x-as-a-service based solutions.
Figure 1. A section from Amazon’s quarterly result
Based on the quarterly result, the income generated by AWS is highly important for Amazon. Just for the last quarter AWS was responsible for income of $1,35B that was a huge part of the total Amazon’s income. Furthermore, AWS generated 1/10 of all Amazon’s net sales in 2017. If the trend continues, there is a possibility that AWS becomes bigger than SAP within a few years.
What those financial numbers means for the current year? AWS is starting once again the new year from the leading position. 2017 they introduced 1430 new services and features and it is expected that they will introduce even more this year. It has begun to be hard to find a nice-to-have service that is not provided by AWS. Yet, the trend is to increase the number of managed services and I expect that trend to continue. Who really likes to be able to look under the hood, people just like to ride.
-Tero