Amazon Web Services (AWS) is continuing to embrace customer efforts to save money on cloud computing costs, though investors aired concerns over the cloud segment's "flattish" revenue growth during the Amazon's fourth-quarter earnings call.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) saw percentage growth in the mid-teens for Q4, which one investor said "implies it could be flattish and even down this quarter."

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said he expects "these optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters," he told investors. "Our customers are looking for ways to save money, and we spend a lot of our time trying to help them do so."

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy noted AWS is "not focused on trying to optimize in any one quarter or any one year. We're trying to build a set of relationships in business that outlast all of us. And so if it's good for our customers to find a way to be more cost effective in an uncertain economy, our team is going to spend a lot of cycles doing that."

In Q3, AWS pulled in $4.5 billion in revenue, representing 28% year-over-year growth and 2022 revenue of $20.5 billion for the cloud segment. Olsavsky noted at the time, however, that at the back end of Q3 "we were more in the mid-20% growth rate," which the provider carried through as a forecast to the fourth quarter.

During that earnings call, Olsavsky credited the uncertain macroeconomic environment for the uptick of AWS customers looking to control costs. "We're proactively working to help customers cost optimize, just as we've done throughout AWS' history, especially in periods of economic uncertainty," he said at the time.

Just like the rest of the world, AWS customers look to reduce their spend when faced with market uncertainty. "We're doing the same thing at Amazon, questioning our infrastructure expenses as well as everything else," Olsavsky said during the Q4 call. "By and large, what we're seeing is just an interest and a priority by our customers to get their spend down as they enter an economic downturn," he reiterated.

The general nature of cloud computing helps customers turn fixed costs into variable costs, and actions like managing workloads more efficiently, switching to lower-cost products, and opting for more efficient infrastructure are popular cost saving measures among AWS customers.

"You can run calculations less frequently. There's just – you can do different types of storage on your data. So there's ways to alter your cost and your bill in a short period of time. I think that's what we're seeing. And as I said, we're working with our customers to help them do that," he said.