No matter how you measure it, Amazon's cloud is huge and still growing at an unbelievable rate.
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy said on Wednesday that AWS was on track to do $13 billion in revenue this year and it's still growing at 50% over 2015.
Whereas Amazon was once the bastion of startups who tended to use it until they were big enough to launch their own data centers, an astounding number of enterprises are now choosing to move their apps and data to Amazon and shut down some, or all, of their data centers. Amazon says it now has more than 1 million active customers including some of the biggest companies in the world.
Amazon is now adding more servers to its cloud on a daily basis than it took to power all of AWS in 2003, Jassy said.
As we previously reported, when Motorola opted to move everything to the cloud, the IT folks looked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google and concluded that "Amazon had better technologies in almost all areas. It is much more mature in terms of functionality," according to Leo Wang, head of cloud computing.
But here's an interesting tidbit that should have competitors even more worried. As Amazon adds more customers and each one asks it to add new features, AWS is actually accelerating in adding stuff to its cloud.
In 2015, it added 750 new features, nearly 3 times as many as it had added in 2013. In 2016, it has so far added 1,000, or three new features every day.
The company is now such the 800-pound gorilla in the market that one of its original huge competitors, VMware, threw in the towel earlier this year and signed on to help sell AWS and make its data center software work better with the cloud.
And it's even winning contracts from the big cloud companies themselves. Earlier this year, Salesforce reversed course on its chummy relationship with Microsoft Azure. (In 2014, Salesforce moved its ExactTarget business unit to Azure.) In May, Salesforce chose Amazon as its "preferred cloud partner." That means it will use AWS to be its international data center in countries where Salesforce does not yet have its own data center for its biggest apps, including its flagship customer relationship management apps. That's a deal worth $400 million over four years to Amazon, the Wall Street Journal reported.
On Wednesday, Amazon announced another, similar partnership with cloud HR software provider Workday, where Workday will use Amazon's international data centers as well (starting with Canada).
In a dig at Salesforce's and Workday's mutual rival, Oracle, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff even tweeted about the partnership.
—Marc Benioff (@Benioff) November 30, 2016
