AWS Chief Exhibits Optimism Despite Recent Outages

Amazon.com Inc AMZN Amazon Web Services head assured that its rapid growth would not lead to broader disruption for customers and internet users despite its recent "incredibly painful" outages, Financial Times reports.

AWS still typically offers customers better "uptime" than they can typically deliver from their own data centers, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said. AWS's sales last year rose 37% Y/Y to $62.2 billion, up from 30% Y/Y in 2020. Operating income was also up 37% to $18.5 billion. 

"We're really still near the beginning of the overall shift to the cloud," he added, pointing to estimates that about 5 to 15 percent of IT workloads have moved from companies' own in-house data centers and on to infrastructures such as AWS, Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google Cloud or Microsoft Corp MSFT Microsoft Azure." 

Selipsky added that while many companies put big investment decisions on hold during the uncertainty of the past two years, Amazon has been investing "very consistently" in new data centers throughout the pandemic, Selipsky said, to ensure it has the capacity for the anticipated growth. 

Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure experienced two significant failures late last year, including a December outage at its data center in northern Virginia, which had also suffered problems in 2020.

Price Action: AMZN shares traded lower by 0.29% at $2,740.97 in the premarket session on the last check Tuesday.

Photo by Tony Webster via Flickr