Amazon.com has taken the unusual step of leading its quarterly earnings webcast with discussion of performance at Amazon Web Services.
Top 50+ AWS Services Explained in 10 Minutes
The e-commerce giant derives the majority of its revenue, unsurprisingly, from retail. But the Amazon cloud generates much more profit. In this quarter, Amazon's operating income was $14.672 billion — $9.334 billion of that from AWS.
The cloud biz delivered that result with revenue of $26.3 billion, but Amazon's full second-quarter revenue was $148 billion. AWS is therefore of huge interest to Amazon's investors – especially as its growth in recent quarters has been slower than the 29 percent delivered by rivals Microsoft and Google.
President and CEO Andy Jassy's opening quote in Amazon's earnings release [PDF] is "We continue to make progress on a number of dimensions, but perhaps none more so than the continued acceleration of AWS growth."
