Amazon: What can you say about AWS 2018 results? #AWS

Tom Paine


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• Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue grew 47% in 2018, to $25.7 billion. That's actually up from 43% growth in 2017, challenging assumptions for now that AWS was following the law of large numbers into a gradually declining growth rate.

• AWS operating margins grew from 24.9% in 2017 to 28.7% in 2018, a neat trick that will be hard to repeat.

• For the fourth quarter, Amazon North America delivered slightly more operating income than AWS - $2.25 billion to $2.18 billion.

• AWS continued to expand its infrastructure in 2018 to best serve customers, launching the AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS Europe (Stockholm) Regions, and announcing plans for both the AWS Africa (Cape Town) as well as the AWS Europe (Milan) Regions.

• Sorry, AWS will not be adding a Philadelphia region in 2019.

• AWS introduced AWS Backup, a centralized backup service that enables businesses to back up their data across the AWS network and on-premises more efficiently

• The remarkable thing is how AWS manages to get so many projects off the ground simultaneously.
  It implies a business structure that is flat, and not a central command and control structure.

• Ellie Mae, Korean Air, Santander’s, Openbank, Pac-12, Mobileye, Guardian Life Insurance, Amgen and National Australia Bank were large new enterprise customers added during the year. The number of financial institutions mentioned is notable.

• AWS' impact upon the computing industry is more extraordinary since most of customer spend is at the Infrastructure as a Service level rather than more value added apps that run on top of them. Yet at the same time AWS is gradually moving up the value chain.

A list of AWS 2018 enhancements is included in the Amazon Earnings Press Release .

Read Timothy Pickett Morgan's WHEN DOES AWS BREAK THROUGH $100 BILLION? for a look at AWS growth
scenarios.