Inside Amazon Web Services: AWS By The Numbers

Everyone in the cloud computing space knows that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is massive. But just how big is it? There are several ways to categorize the size of a cloud giant.

Here are a just few to show the true size and proportion of this industry leader:

How big is Amazon Web Services infrastructure?

AWS has 66 availability zones within 21 geographic regions around the world. Each availability zone consists of one to dozens of individual data centers. To visualize these data centers, check out AWS’s exploration of them here.

Amazon Web Services Number of Employees

While numbers for employees of Amazon as a whole are reported in the company’s quarterly earnings reports (630,600 as of Q1 2019), the number of those under AWS is less clear.

AWS has just over 40,000 employees listed on LinkedIn, but of course, that’s not the most accurate measure. By eyeballing the operating expenses reported for the AWS segment compared to Amazon’s business as a whole, you could estimate up to 62,000, but it’s likely lower than that.

As of this writing, it has 12,280 full-time job openings listed on their website, while Amazon as a whole has 32,454 openings.

I will personally be interested to see how this is affected by HQ2 becoming ParkMyCloud’s neighbor in Northern Virginia later this year.

How big is AWS’s market share?

When looking at public cloud, it’s clear AWS still holds the largest portion of the market. A recent report put the company at 47% of the market, with the next-closest competitor as Azure at 22%. More about Amazon Web Services vs. Azure vs. Google cloud market share.

How big is AWS’s revenue?

For Q1 2019, the company reported sales of $7.7 billion, showing consistent growth and the largest of any of the cloud service providers. For the full year of 2018, AWS reported $25.7 billion in revenue – that’s more than McDonald’s. Additionally, AWS has $16 billion or more in backlog revenue from contracts for future services. It is a growing proportion of Amazon’s business. In fact:

How big is the list of products?

When we last counted in April, there were 170 unique services listed on the company’s offerings page, and there could certainly be more by now. These range from core compute products like EC2 to newer releases like AWS Deepracer for machine learning. Look for a spike in this count after AWS re:Invent in early December, as the cloud provider tends to save up announcements for its yearly user conference.

How big is Amazon Web Services re:Invent?

In 2018, re:Invent pulled 52,000 attendees, and estimates a crowd of 62,000 for 2019, each year taking up a large portion of the Las Vegas Strip.

In comparison, Microsoft Ignite expects 25,000 attendees this year, Google Cloud Next estimated 30,000 attendees, and VMworld estimates 21,000 attendees. Then again, Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2018 drew 170,000 attendees, and Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reports 175,212 attendees for 2019. So, while AWS re:Invent may be large for a cloud-specific conference, it’s not quite a giant as far as tech shows go.

How big is it as a portion of Amazon?

In first quarter reports, Amazon Web Services contributed about 50% of Amazon’s overall operating income, with an operating margin of 29%. Overall, AWS is growing as a contributor to Amazon’s income and growth. More here.

So how big is it? It seems that by whatever metrics are chosen, AWS is the giant of the cloud computing sector.

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