AWS turns 10, surpasses 1m active customers

Ten years after entering the cloud computing market, Amazon Web Services has grown to have over a million active customers in 190 countries.

To mark the anniversary, AWS has released a series of statistics demonstrating its growth over the past decade.

AWS customers include nearly 2000 government agencies, 5000 education institutions and over 17,500 non-profits, the company revealed.

In Australia, key customers include the major banks, major government departments and large companies including Cochlear Limited, Fairfax Media and News Corporation. The company launched its first Australian availability zones in 2012.

From an initial start in the US, AWS’s global infrastructure has grown to comprise 33 availability zones across 12 regions. Another five regions are expected to come online through the next year, including in China, Canada and the UK.

AWS Edge locations meanwhile now consist of 54 points of presence worldwide, including in Australia.

AWS’s first cloud infrastructure service, Amazon S3, has meanwhile grown to hold trillions of objects and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second.

The Amazon S3 launched in March 2006 and the Amazon EC2 debuted five months later. EC2 instance usage grew 80% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2015. Customers today use 143 million hours per month of Amazon EC2 for AWS Marketplace products.

“A decade ago, discussion about the risks of cloud computing centered around adoption. It was new and unproven, and raised more questions than it answered. That era passed some time ago,” AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr commented in a blog post.

“These days, I hear more talk about the risk of not going to the cloud. Organisations of all shapes and sizes want to be nimble, to use modern infrastructure and to be able to attract professionals with a strong desire to do the same. Today’s employees want to use the latest and most relevant technology in order to be as productive as possible.”

Image courtesy of publicradioexchange under CC