Amazon’s employee base grew by 4.8 percent, according to the company’s second-quarter earnings statement. Especially its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosting division is growing rapidly, with “thousands of new employees” being added in 2014, bringing Amazon’s total work force at 132,600 people.
The AWS team grew by thousands of employees in 2014, expanding AWS infrastructure, enterprise and public sector sales capabilities and allowing the team to innovate at an accelerating pace.
With 250 significant service and feature releases year-to-date, and substantial price reductions for customers starting in the second quarter (28% to 51% depending on the service), AWS continues to grow strongly, with cloud hosting usage growth close to 90% year-over-year in the second quarter.
New AWS services
In 2014, AWS announced a new general-purpose cloud instance type for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The new T2 instances are the lowest-cost Amazon EC2 instance option and would be ideal for Web servers, developer environments, and small databases.
AWS also announced several new capabilities to make it easier for developers to build, deploy, and scale mobile applications, including Amazon Cognito for identity management and syncing, Amazon Mobile Analytics to visualize and understand app usage data, and an AWS Mobile SDK, which provides easy, mobile-optimized access to other AWS services to power mobile apps that can scale from tens to hundreds of millions of users.
In addition, the public cloud hosting provider announced Amazon Zocalo, a fully managed, secured enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user productivity. With Amazon Zocalo, customers can store, share, and gather feedback on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, PDFs, or text files – from the device of their choice.
