Amazon Web Services (AWS) has raked in $6.1 billion for the online retail giant and technology firm in its 2018 second quarter financial results.
Given the trend of digital transformation running through companies looking to move from legacy on-premise IT infrastructure to more cloud-powered services, it is no surprise that AWS is seeing growth in cloud revenue.
However, the second quarter was arguably notable given AWS added Ryanair, Major League Baseball, 21st Century Fox and Epic Games to its healthy customer roster.
Compared to the same quarter in 2017, which hit 4.1bn in net sales, AWS made nearly 50% more in its latest quarter. But that growth also meant an increase in operating expenses, which rose from $3.18bn in 2017's second quarter to $4.46bn in the same quarter for 2018.
Nevertheless, operating income for AWS was rose from $916 million to $1.6bn, demonstrating the rude health AWS is in and its potential to generate a healthy income for Amazon, which still makes the bulk of its money through product sales via its online store.
In total, Amazon increased its total product and services sales to $52.9bn, a 39% increase on the same time 12 months earlier, and a record sales quarter for the company.
With Amazon continuing to add more services and features into its AWS cloud platform and offerings, ranging from supporting database workloads to powering smart software and data analytics systems, AWS is likely to be at the heart of future Amazon growth.
AWS is currently the leader in the public cloud, and while Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and Google Cloud are in second and third place respectively, they both have more work to do to catch AWS' reach.
Image credit: Bigstock
