AWS

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy faces enormous challenges amid falling profits and negative numbers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Adam Selipsky, Amazon, Andy Jassy, AWS, Commerce, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Ecommerce and D2C, EC News Analysis, Enterprise, jeff bezosNo Comments

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is the definition of a company man. In an age when people switch jobs frequently, he has been at Amazon for 25 years, working his way up to president and CEO. But before he reached the corner office, he helped build Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, into a $60 billion juggernaut. It wasn’t exactly a rise from the mailroom, but Jassy was there as founder Jeff Bezos’ aide-de-camp when they came up with the idea of AWS in the early 2000s at an executive offsite. He helped build it. He nurtured it. He made it into the crown jewel of the company. So when Bezos announced he was stepping down early last year, it didn’t take long for the organization to turn to Jassy, whose hard work at AWS and his deep understanding of company culture seemed to make him the perfect heir apparent. But things haven’t necessarily gone as planned since he took over the leadership role in July 2021. Much of what has happened has been out of his control. Like many chief executives, he inherited the problems left behind by his predecessor. During the pandemic, Amazon became the general store for the world. People stuck in lockdown turned to Amazon for their goods. The company’s revenues mushroomed and its workforce exploded, with the organization adding an astonishing 800,000 workers, mostly in its warehouses (per The Wall Street Journal). The future was bright, but as Jassy took over last year, people were heading out again. Suddenly, everyone wasn’t buying everything online anymore. As we headed into 2022, other macroeconomic factors began to affect commerce — online and brick-and-mortar — as inflation soared and consumers’ buying power began to diminish. Add to that the higher cost of energy and persistent supply chain issues, and Amazon was suddenly facing some challenges that were beginning to have a serious impact on earnings.

Amazon’s income dipped in Q3 2022 as the economy took its toll • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Amazon, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Commerce, earnings, Q3 2022No Comments

Amazon suffered steep losses in year-over-year income as post-pandemic shopping habits and inflation threw the retailer for a loop. In its third quarter 2022 earnings report today, Amazon revealed that operating income decreased to $2.5 billion in Q3 2022 compared to $4.9 billion the same quarter last year, while net income dipped to $2.9 billion versus $3.2 billion during Q3 2021. Operating income refers to earnings after expenses excepting the cost of debt, taxes, and certain one-off items. Net income shows the profit remaining after all costs are subtracted from revenue generated from sales. Amazon noted an operating loss of $0.4 billion in North America in Q3 2022, an unfavorable outcome compared to the nearly $1 billion in operating income the company reached in the quarter a year ago. Internationally, the tech giant fared worse, notching a $2.5 billion operating loss versus Q3 2021’s $900 million loss. As is usually the case, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud services division, was a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy quarter, with AWS’ income reaching $5.4 billion in Q3 2022 versus $4.9 billion in the same quarter last year. That is, however, down from the $5.72 billion in operating income that AWS raked in during Q2 2022. On news of Amazon’s Q3 losses, the company’s stock dropped ~20% in after-hours trading. “We’re … encouraged by the steady progress we’re making on lowering costs in our stores fulfillment network, and have a set of initiatives that we’re methodically working through that we believe will yield a stronger cost structure for the business moving forward,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a press release. “There is obviously a lot happening in the macroeconomic environment, and we’ll balance our investments to be more streamlined without compromising our key long-term, strategic bets.”

AWS makes Neptune, its graph database service, serverless • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Apps, AWS, Enterprise, neptuneNo Comments

Nearly five years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Neptune, a service for running apps that need a graph database to store and query connected data sets. Now, to keep up with the serverless trend, AWS is expanding the offering with Amazon Neptune Serverless, a serverless option for Neptune that automatically scales to support variable graph database workloads. Unlike traditional databases, graph databases store nodes and relationships instead of tables, columns and documents. Developers building apps that track relationships among connected data points use graph databases to understand those relationships within the full data set; graph database use cases include contact tracing, fraud detection, drug discovery and even network security. Graph databases are powerful, to be sure. But they’re also unpredictable in terms of processing overhead. Typically, graph databases require a dev team to continuously monitor and reconfigure compute capacity to maintain good performance. Amazon Neptune Serverless ostensibly solves this problem by autonomously provisioning, scaling and managing clusters of graph database instances. Neptune Serverless supports the same graph query languages as Amazon Neptune, and customers only pay for the apps they use, according to AWS VP of databases, analytics and machine learning Swami Sivasubramanian. “Customers have asked us to take care of the heavy lifting associated with managing capacity and optimizing for cost and performance,” Sivasubramanian said in a press release. “Now, with Amazon Neptune Serverless, customers have a graph database that automatically provisions and seamlessly scales clusters to provide just the right amount of capacity to meet demand.” Neptune Serverless is generally available as of today today to AWS customers running Neptune in the U.S. East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland) and Europe (London) server regions. Amazon says it’ll come to additional regions in the future. Serverless computing, which abstracts away the complexities of managing server capacity, is a growing trend in software development. According to one 2020 survey, 50% of AWS users said that they were using some degree of serverless capabilities. And CB Insights estimated the market for serverless was worth $7.7 billion in 2021, up from $1.9 billion in 2016. AWS last majorly expanded its serverless product portfolio in April, when it launched Amazon Aurora Serverless V2, its serverless database service, and SageMaker Serverless Inference, a solution for running AI systems that doesn’t require configuring the underlying infrastructure. July saw the release of several new serverless analytics offerings, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka and Amazon Redshift.