Amazon reported a third consecutive quarter of record profits today, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) took a bunch of credit for that, again.
Amazon reported AWS sales of $2.88 billion in the second quarter, up from $1.82 billion for the same quarter in 2015. And AWS’s profitability climbed, with operating income reaching $718 million compared with $305 million a year ago.
During the quarter, Amazon launched a new AWS region in India, its sixth region in Asia Pacific. With this launch, AWS provides 35 availability zones across 13 technology infrastructure regions globally.
In terms of the additional capacity in India, AWS is focused on expanding its geographical footprint. “Existing customers will run more of their workloads on AWS, and we also open up some new customers when we open these regions,” said Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky on today’s earnings call.
There were several other notable events for AWS during the quarter.
Salesforce selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. Salesforce will expand use of AWS to core services, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and App Cloud.
AWS announced a managed, cloud-based file system — Amazon Elastic File System — to set up and scale file storage in the AWS Cloud.
AWS also launched X1 instances, a memory-optimized instance for Amazon EC2. The company said X1 instances are ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high-performance computing workloads.
Olsavsky said AWS is committed to investing in new services up the stack. It added 422 services and features in the first half of 2016. And the business segment will continue to add functions for data analytics, mobile, the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning.
For the company overall, second-quarter net sales increased 31 percent to $30.4 billion, compared with $23.2 billion in the second quarter 2015.
Net income was $857 million, or $1.78 per diluted share, compared with $92 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2015.
