Amazon's Q4 2013 Results

Jack Clark at The Register estimates that Amazon's cloud computing business put over a billion dollars on the bottom line in Q4 2013. The competition was left in the dust:

This compares with a claim by Microsoft that its Azure cloud wing was a billion-dollar business when measured on an annual basis, and Rackspace's most recent quarterly earnings of $108.4m for its public cloud. Google also operates its own anti-Amazon cloud products via Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine, but doesn't break out revenue in a meaningful format.

Of course, much of this profit comes from selling computing rather than storage, but this is further evidence against the idea that "the cloud is cheaper". Cloud services can save money in a situation of spiky demand, but for base-load tasks such as preservation they are uneconomic.