AWS Beats Expectations In Q2 With 49% Revenue Surge

Amazon Web Services made another strong showing in the second quarter of the year, even as rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are reporting major growth of their own.

Amazon reported that its AWS division generated $6.11 billion in revenue for the second quarter, ended June 30. That's up 49 percent from the same period a year earlier, when the cloud services provider saw revenue of $4.1 billion.

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The results also surpassed the $6.01 billion that Wall Street expected for AWS' second quarter, according to a consensus of analysts surveyed by research firm FactSet.

In announcing the results, Amazon detailed a lengthy list of product updates to its AWS platform during the quarter, including the general availability release for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes; for the fully managed graph database service Amazon Neptune; and for "the world's first deep learning-enabled wireless video camera," DeepLens, which is aimed at assisting developers in getting familiar with machine learning.

Amazon also pointed to an announcement that "thousands of enterprise customers" are using AWS to run their SAP workloads. "Businesses of all sizes and across virtually every industry and geography are running their SAP landscapes on AWS to simplify infrastructure management, improve time-to-market, lower costs, and deliver innovation with AWS services integration," Amazon said in a news release.

Customer wins during the second quarter for AWS included zulily, 21st Century Fox, Verizon-owned Oath and Major League Baseball.

The AWS division generated $1.64 billion in operating income for Seattle-based Amazon during the second quarter, compared to $916 million during the same period of 2017.

AWS is looking to fend off cloud services assaults from its largest competitor, Microsoft's Azure platform, which reported 89-percent growth in the most recent quarter--as well as from the Google Cloud Platform, which was the fastest-growing business in Google's "Other Revenues" segment in Q2.

Overall, Amazon reported $52.89 billion in revenue for the second quarter of the year, an increase of 39 percent from $37.96 billion a year earlier. Total operating income reached $2.98 billion, up from $628 million the year before, while Amazon reported earnings of $5.07 of per diluted share, compared to 40 cents per diluted share year-over-year.