back to article AWS to crack $10bn annual sales this year says Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has penned a new letter to shareholders in which he points out that Amazon Web Services is bigger, and growing faster, than its parent company did at the same age. “This year, Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales,” Bezos writes. “Also this year, Amazon Web …

  1. Adam 52 Silver badge

    what customers tell us they want

    What I want is stuff that works.

    ec2 works. S3 works. RDS mostly works. EBS has occasional flips. SQS, Kinesis, Redshift and Lambda are all very flaky. IAM, and especially ec2 roles, is just too easy to shoot yourself in the foot with.

    AWS are adding services fast but they're not making them reliable. Even worse the a pre-sp1 Microsoft product.

    1. Nate Amsden

      Re: what customers tell us they want

      I guess you didn't get the memo - if it's not reliable for you, then you are using it wrong.

      Using amazon cloud was the most frustrating and painful part of my career I think. I am happy I haven't had to touch it in several years now.

      The company I was at at the time had very high level connections to amazon cloud, I even had a meeting with the chief Andy over there along with his "chief scientist"(forgot the name). Only one meeting though my CTO said I was kind of rude so he didn't want to bring me back. My manager knew I was being polite and holding back a lot though. They basically gave us the same story they had given the company on several previous meetings ("yeah we know, we're trying to fix that.." -- but they never fixed it).

      Andy even personally tried to get me fired for writing this blog post years ago:

      http://www.techopsguys.com/2010/10/06/amazon-ec2-not-your-fathers-enterprise-cloud/

      (my boss at the time read the post and said he had no problem with it. Andy called my CEO, CEO called my CTO, CTO called me I ended up taking the post down for a few years until the company imploded, company was polite enough to threaten me again about the blog post when I left the company eventually)

      I loved the look on my boss's face at the time (himself having worked at amazon for about 10 years before) -- the company was spending (on paper, I say on paper because I am not sure how much the company actually paid in money, I think amazon forgave much of the bills due to relationships) roughly $450,000/month hosting shit there. Everyone at the company hated it. So my boss reached out to them (this was back in late 2010) asking if they could come out on site to assist us because clearly we were doing something wrong. Both companies were HQ'd in Seattle, so not like it was far to travel.

      They basically told us to fuck off, that was not their model.

      I think things have changed since but I mean take pretty much any other big company, HP, IBM, Oracle, MS whomever. If you are spending anywhere remotely resembling that amount they'll fall over backwards to come out on site to help the customer. Amazon didn't give a shit.

      The company imploded maybe a year later.

      Current company launched in amazon in late 2011 and moved out in 2012, same manager hired me at both companies, I was hired with the intent to move us out. The manager worked hard on cost modeling prior to app launch(he himself had probably 2 and a half years of amazon cloud experience and the ops guy he was working with was similar). Within a week of app launch all of those models were thrown away and costs exploded. By the time we moved out we were up to around $120k/mo spend with them. We've probably grown 8X since that time.

      Fortunately the management I've had at current company is cloud aware and I don't have to fight that fight.

      As shitty as the last company was, without being there I wouldn't of met the people that landed me at my current gig (in bay area instead of Seattle), where I've had a pretty happy life for the past 5 years at a stable growing company. So the last company did serve some purpose.

  2. astrax

    Fair play to the Amazonians

    Despite the obligatory cringe when ever I hear the term "Cloud" mentioned, I can't help but feel Amazon have done a terrific job over the past decade. Sure, "Cloud" solutions (aka SER, aka someone-elses-resource) aren't applicable to everyone, but it's certainly changed/changing the landscape of IT infrastructure across the board. Generally I think this disruption is a good thing.

    AWS must be doing something right.

  3. John Sanders
    Holmes

    hmmm

    I would like to see a detailed breakdown of these figures.

    Last I know is that Amazon the shop was bringing all the profit and AWS was still losing money fast and loose.

    1. Adam 52 Silver badge

      Re: hmmm

      AWS made just under 2 billion profit last year, according to El Reg

      http://m.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/28/amazons_numbers_for_quarter/

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: hmmm

      Last I know is that Amazon the shop was bringing all the profit

      What profit? Margins on the sale of physical goods have always been razor thin.

      1. John Sanders
        Meh

        Re: hmmm

        """What profit? Margins on the sale of physical goods have always been razor thin."""

        They built AWS on the back of Amazon.com's supposed profitability.

        Anyway, regardless of what we think unless they publish a better breakdown of the figures it is all speculation from our part and provider's "Chinese smoke and mirrors".

        My scepticism-sense kicks-in automatically with any claims that come off the modern corporate PR machines without sufficient data to back it up.

        There has always been a lot of creativity on Amazon's numbers.

        1. Qassam ElShawarma

          Re: hmmm @John Sanders

          Nope. The other way around - AWS is bankrolling the retail operations. It was never about "using profitability" from retail, or "using spare capacity".

          AWS is around 30% of margin; retail is around 1%.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: hmmm

      http://www.wired.com/2015/10/get-used-to-amazon-being-a-profitable-company/

      But AWS was the real winner. The cloud business’s operating income in the third quarter ($521 million), was almost as much as Amazon’s whole North America e-commerce business ($528 million). Amazon says its operating margins were 3 percent and 25 percent for its North America e-commerce business and AWS, respectively. All of which just means: Its cloud business is still killing it. And it adds, in a big way, to Amazon’s new profitability.

  4. Pseudonymous Diehard

    AWS is cool...

    But the bills dont half rack up quickly and the statements can be friggin' hard to interpret.

    I use Digital Ocean myself.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lets hope jeff does make a play for "LexCorp"...

    Is the real reason that jeff is funding "Blue Origin" is because he is on the hunt for the Green stuff... Kriptonite?

  6. Alistair

    Amazon's Amazing Profits

    The profit of course being accounted for in the country of least tax accounting regulation..........

    As much as one has to say "They're only taking advantage of what the law permits", I'd still like to see a corporate that walks away from the WallStreet mantra of 'you didn't make more profit this quarter, OMG YOU TANK!', and actually decide that paying local taxes without the dodges was worth the reputation coin to do so.

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