Amazon AWS update

Amazon have just finished what is called the AWS Re:INVENT conference. I don't blame you for not knowing what that is, we will try our best to explain. It is 32 thousand folks crammed into a giant auditorium (this time in Vegas) with the web service business chief (Andy Jassy) opening with examples of how the services are used, and then away we go. Get togethers for all the people there, plus another 50 odd thousand watching online, in part enabled through the backbone of Amazon Web Services (which is what AWS stands for). Don't feel confused, this is all rather new for all of us, this business after all is only ten years old, and is half the age of the parent company, Amazon.

Amazon Web Services, as we have tried to explain in the past with our various reports - Amazon 2Q blows estimates away, is a big and growing business. Think of the cloud as an offsite storage space. Provided that your internet connection is up to scratch and that you do not need to have to worry about capping your data usage, this is the future of storage and using services, not as much pressure is put on your hardware.

The group describes the services as follows: "AWS offers over 70 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise applications from 38 Availability Zones (AZs) across 14 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and India. AWS services are trusted by more than a million active customers around the world - including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies - to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs."

This is the future of storage. As data becomes cheaper and faster, it makes more and more sense to store all of your data off device and off site. With mirrored and accessible AZs (Availability Zones) more and more available, it will be quicker to access. We continue to think that this is going to become an increasingly bigger part of Amazon's business, and continue to accumulate a business that trades at a discount to their sum of the parts.