The rocketship of cloud growth continued at the end of 2016 for Amazon Web Services. The public cloud provider announced Thursday that it brought in a little more than $3.5 billion during the fourth quarter of last year, up 47 percent from the same period in 2015. Quarterly operating income rose 60 percent to $926 million, compared to $580 million during the prior year quarter.
That’s nothing to sneeze at, but AWS’s revenue growth was the lowest it has been in the past two years. There are a number of potential explanations for that, including seasonal changes in cloud migrations, and difficulty driving increased growth on larger and larger total revenue.
Continuing growth is a positive sign for AWS, which is locked in tight competition with companies including Microsoft and Google to try and power the next generation of business applications.
