During Q2, Amazon Web Services usage growth was close to 90% year-over-year, according to the company's newly released financial report. Amazon highlighted the following AWS milestones:
- The AWS team grew by thousands of employees this past year, expanding AWS infrastructure, enterprise and public sector sales capabilities and allowing the team to innovate at an accelerating pace.
- AWS has made 250 significant service and feature releases year-to-date and announced substantial price reductions for customers ranging from 28% to 51%.
- AWS announced a new general purpose instance type for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with prices starting at $0.013 per hour -- its lowest-cost EC2 instance option.
- AWS announced several new capabilities to make it easier for developers to build, deploy, and scale mobile applications, including Amazon Cognito for identity management and syncing.
- AWS announced Amazon Zocalo, a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities.
- AWS enhanced its secure block storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), announcing new encryption capabilities, introducing a new lower-cost SSD-backed EBS volume type, and reducing prices on EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes by 35 percent.
Amazon also disclosed that revenue for Amazon Web Services (North America), Advertising Services, and Co-branded Credit Cards grew at a 38% YoY rate in Q2 2014, reaching $1.12 billion. Internationally, revenue for this same category was $50 million for the quarter.
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Microsoft Posts Triple Digit Growth Rate for Cloud Services
In its quarterly financial report earlier this week, Microsoft highlighted surging revenue associated with cloud services, offset by declines by its recently acquired Nokia business. Two highlights:- Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers totaled more than 5.6 million, adding more than 1 million subscribers again this quarter.
- Commercial cloud revenue grew 147% with an annualized run rate that exceeds $4.4 billion.
"We are thrilled with the tremendous momentum of our cloud offerings with Office 365 and Azure both growing over 100% again,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. “Looking forward, we are excited by the amazing opportunities enabled by our technology roadmap and our strong engagement across partners, customers, and developers.”
