Amazon cloud double fluffs in 2011

Being the touchstone for cloud computing, online retailing giant Amazon wants to brag about its compute, storage, and other cloud services that are sold pursuant to this agreement the Amazon Web Services brand. For whatever reason - probably to obscure the costs and possibly the profits of the AWS subsidiary - Amazon has not broken out the business, and on the whole lump it into the Other bucket.

In 2011, another AWS center was plunked into Tokyo, followed by a special super-secure cloud for the US federal government outside the DC area, a center in an undisclosed location in Oregon that offers prices that are 10 per cent lower than the California center, and clearly the São Paulo facility that just opened. Amazon as well opened up seven CloudFront edge locations in 2011, which are content-delivery network services that front-end AWS data centers to speed up applications.

During 2011, AWS provided cloud compute services to over 100 US government agencies, and it doubled the number of CloudFront clients to over 20,000. That last figure is probably a very good indicator of the number of companies doing serious computing on Amazon's cloud, and permanently paying Amazon big bucks for various compute, storage, and auxiliary services.

Amazon does not divulge the number of clients using its core Elastic Compute Cloud service - however it should because EC2 is a material and important part of Amazon's business.

What Amazon as well does not discuss is how much revenue AWS is raking in, how much investment it takes, and what - if any - profits it generates.

The lion's share of this other category

It is hard to say if AWS represents the lion's share of this "other" category, nevertheless it is tempting to believe so. In 2008, Amazon booked $19.2bn in sales and $542m in Other earnings, and in 2009, Amazon grew by 27.9 per cent to $24.5bn and Other grew by 20.5 per cent to $653m. In 2010, Other grew by 45.9 per cent to $953m, during Amazon overall only grew by 39.6 per cent to $34.2bn. In the first nine months of 2011, Amazon posted $30.6bn in sales during the Other category within this number accounted for $1.08bn in sales.

Other is now growing firmly ahead of Amazon overall, and the growth is accelerating. That sure sounds like cloud computing - if you believe all the hype. ®

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