AWS sales surge 50 per cent to $2.5bn as cloud demand continues to grow

And the rest of Amazon turns a tidy profit, for a change, too

Amazon Web Services (AWS) posted a revenue increase of 56 per cent in the first quarter of 2016 as demand for the cloud hosting platform continued to grow.

Sales of $2.5bn represented a significant increase on the $1.6bn in revenue posted in the same quarter last year, although only a minor increase on the $2.4bn it posted in the fourth quarter of 2015.

The results helped AWS to post better profit figures than the core Amazon retail business. AWS filed positive net income of $604m, up from $195m in the same period in 2015 - a point not missed by analysts:

The firm also has major plans to continue the expansion of AWS. Chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky reported that AWS will open 11 more 'Availability Zones' in the next 12 months to help meet demand across the world.

He also touted the ongoing development of new features in AWS which, he said, numbered "214 in Q1, up from 170 in the first quarter of last year".

AWS is in a fierce battle for public cloud dominance with its main rivals Google and Microsoft. The latter released its latest financials last week, showing that the Azure platform is performing well, although perhaps not as well as hoped.

Amazon posted overall net income of $513m for the quarter from revenues of $15bn as the company continues to invest back into all areas of the business, such as increasing data centre and distribution centre capacity.

The use of AWS is central to many organisations' operations, such as Ticketmaster and Peterborough City Council, both of whom presented at the recent V3 Cloud Summit about their use of such platforms to boost development and reduce on-site support demands.