AWS Reports Strong Growth in Q3, Opens Germany Datacenter

Posted on by Stanley

Despite Amazon.com’s poor performance overall, Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) Inc. showed strong growth in its fiscal third quarter.
Amazon.com reported Thursday that it had generated $20.58 billion in revenue during the quarter. This is a 20% increase year-over-year. Wall Street had expected the company to report revenue of $20.58 billion. Analyst expectations of a $0.74 decrease in shares were exceeded by a $0.95 drop in shares. The company reported a net loss in Q3 of $437 million
However, sales for “Other”, which mainly includes the AWS business, increased by 40% year-over-year to $1.34 billion. AWS usage in Q3 increased by approximately 90 percent, just like it did in Q2.
Amazon.com cited this week’s launch the AWS Directory Service Launch as one of its milestones this year. The company stated that AWS has been enhanced with more than 350 new services and features this year.
New Frankfurt Datacenter
Amazon.com announced a cloud milestone on Thursday with the opening of a new AWS Datacenter in Frankfurt, Germany.
The Frankfurt datacenter, which is the second AWS Datacenter in the European Union (the other being in Ireland), brings the total number worldwide of AWS regions to 11. According to Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, it supports most AWS services.
Barr wrote that the new Frankfurt Region supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) and related services including Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (EBS), Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing. It also supports AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CloudFormation.
The Frankfurt datacenter offers European customers an alternative to the Ireland datacenter. It allows them to store their data in Europe while also improving latency and fault tolerance. This is especially important in the post-PRISM environment, where cloud providers are under greater scrutiny for data protection and privacy.
Andy Jassy, AWS Senior Vice President, stated that German users are particularly cautious about cloud data being stored offshore.
Jassy stated that “What we found with our German clients, perhaps more than other places in this world is they have passion for the data to dwell in-country.”
Barr stated that the Frankfurt datacenter adheres to “all applicable EU Data Protection Laws.”