
Amazon.com Announces First Quarter Sales Up 43% to $51.0B - runesoerensen
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=2345075
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chatmasta
Anyone else think the 50% cloud revenue increase might be due to spectre and
meltdown mitigations? Those mitigations caused a 30% “slowdown” for many major
workloads. That slowdown translates directly to CPU credits, i.e. minutes
spent over baseline CPU usage. It also means any company operating servers
with less than 30% headroom had to provision additional capacity to continue
meeting demand.

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whoisjuan
AWS Meltdown patch only affected a very small portion of customers and the
issue was fixed after rebooting the instances, so people who got affected were
able to recover fastly, so no.

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chatmasta
My understanding is the patch removed certain branch prediction optimizations.
Systems post-patch were running some loads at 30% higher usage. I don’t see
how a reboot would affect that?

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mrep
It reduced capacity by 30% which means a 40% increase in cpu usage. Here is
one of my teams RDS instances during the timeline of the patch:
[https://imgur.com/a/khGxU](https://imgur.com/a/khGxU)

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chatmasta
Exactly. That’s what I was suggesting originally. It seems pretty cut and dry
and would certainly explain the abnormally large increase in cloud revenue.

This is ongoing, correct? Since fundamentally the patch disables optimizations
that would reduce cpu workload for many tasks?

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mrep
It is definitely permanent and I agree this is almost certainly a certainly a
contributing factor in the increased cloud revenue.

However, the increase was only 2.7% (44% YOY cloud revenue growth last quarter
and 48% YOY cloud revenue growth this quarter.

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myroon5
Also announced on the earnings call:

Annual Prime membership in US to $119 from $99 in the coming months

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pc2g4d
I have no idea what I'm talking about, but somehow 43% sales growth strikes me
as implausibly large.

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ianai
That’s exactly what it is. The increase in prime price makes me think they’re
feeling very confident in their market demand. Also very damn greedy.

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myroon5
Segment Highlights:

Y/Y net sales growth:

North America 46 %

International 34 %

AWS 49 %

Consolidated 43 %

\------------------------------------

Net sales mix:

North America 60 %

International 29 %

AWS 11 %

Consolidated 100 %

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kgwgk
International Y/Y net sales growth is 34%, but adjusting for the forex
tailwinds it’s 21%.

North America Y/Y net sales growth is 46%, but adjusting for the Whole Foods
acquisition it’s... unfortunately they won’t tell us (maybe 25%?).

