Amazon Web Services: At over $40 billion annual run rate, AWS growing faster than ever

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud arm of ecommerce giant Amazon that started off as a side business, has grown into a behemoth in itself, raking in $10 billion in sales in the first quarter this year, with a super annual run rate of more than $40 billion.

The cloud computing service logged $10.2 billion in sales this quarter, up from $7.7 billion from the year-ago quarter – a growth rate of 33 per cent.

According to Amazon, AWS now spans 76 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

In these COVID-19 times, AWS is currently helping schools around the world quickly deploy and transition to online learning through its EdTech customers and partners.

"In India, EdTech startup Impartus is launching virtual classrooms for more than 530,000 students — the online equivalent of 13,000 physical classrooms," said Amazon.

Matt Garman, Vice President of AWS Sales and Marketing, recently informed that CareerLauncher is working with the government in Delhi to help train teachers on effective virtual teaching techniques and technologies.

A pilot programme of the company''s Aspiration.ai portal went live just two weeks ago and will roll out to 1,200 schools and 190,000 students in Delhi over this month.

AWS has announced the general availability of Amazon Detective, a security service that makes it easy for customers to conduct faster and more efficient investigations into security issues across their AWS workloads.

Amazon Detective automatically collects log data from a customer's resources and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build interactive visualizations that help customers analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities.

Also available is Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed database service for Cassandra workloads.

AWS has also announced the general availability of Amazon Augmented Artificial Intelligence (Amazon A2I), a fully managed service that makes it easy to add human review to machine learning predictions to enhance model and application accuracy by continuously identifying and improving low confidence predictions.

Human review for model predictions can be added to new or existing applications using reviewers from Mechanical Turk, third party vendors, or a customer's own employees.

"AWS helped power the NFL's first ever remote draft — the most watched ever, reaching more than 55 million viewers total," said Amazon.