Revenues for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Q4 2017 reached $5.113 billion, up 45% yoy. Operating income for AWS amounted to $1.354 billion, up 46% yoy, as disclosed in Amazon’s quarterly financial report.
Amazon cited a laundry list of milestones for the quarter:
- Newly announced enterprise customers going all-in on AWS include Expedia, Ellucian, and DigitalGlobe. The Walt Disney Company and Turner named AWS their preferred public cloud provider; Symantec will leverage AWS as its strategic infrastructure provider for the vast majority of its cloud workloads; Expedia, Intuit, the National Football League (NFL), Capital One, DigitalGlobe, and Cerner announced they’ve chosen AWS for machine learning and artificial intelligence; and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Honeywell, Experian, FICO, Insitu, LexisNexis, Sysco, Discovery Communications, Dow Jones, and Ubisoft kicked off major new moves to AWS.
- In Q4, AWS launched a new region in France and a second AWS Region in China. AWS plans to open 12 more Availability Zones across four regions (Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the U.S.) between now and early 2019. AWS now operates 52 Availability Zones across 18 infrastructure regions globally.
- AWS released 497 significant new services and features in the fourth quarter, bringing the total number of launches in 2017 to 1,430.
- AWS launched EC2 P3 instances which are optimized for machine learning and high performance computing — providing up to six times better performance than any other GPU instances available in the cloud today.
- AWS introduced four Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that allow developers to build applications that emulate human-like cognition: Amazon Transcribe for converting speech to text; Amazon Translate for translating text between languages; Amazon Comprehend for understanding relationships and finding insights within text; and Amazon Rekognition Video, a deep-learning powered video analysis service that tracks people, detects activities, and recognizes objects, celebrities, and inappropriate content.
- AWS launched AWS DeepLens, a deep-learning enabled wireless video camera that pairs an HD camera developer kit with a set of sample projects to help developers learn machine learning concepts, including computer vision and deep learning.
- AWS announced two new container capabilities that make it easier to deploy, manage, and scale container workloads on AWS. Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) brings Kubernetes to AWS as a fully managed service, enabling customers to run Kubernetes applications on AWS without the need to become experts in operating Kubernetes clusters. AWS also introduced AWS Fargate that allows customers to launch and run containers without provisioning or managing servers or clusters.
- AWS announced AWS Media Services, a family of five integrated broadcast-quality media services that make it easy for video providers of all kinds to create reliable, flexible, and scalable video offerings in the cloud. These five services enable customers to build end-to-end workflows for both live and on-demand video with the professional features, image quality, and reliability needed to deliver premium video experiences to viewers across a multitude of devices. By combining the proven video solutions from AWS Elemental with the security, durability, availability, and scalability of AWS, video providers can focus on innovating and making great content instead of spending time building and maintaining on-premises video infrastructure.
- AWS and VMware announced that VMware Cloud on AWS is expanding availability from the U.S. West (Oregon) region to include the AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia) region.