Amazon's enormous cloud business grew 64%, ahead of expectations

Matt Weinberger

Amazon Web Services boss Andy Jassy at AWS Summit San Francisco 2015

Amazon reported quarterly cloud results on Thursday of almost $2.57 billion in revenue, up 64% from last year, and $604 million in operating income.

The unit was expected to post sales of $2.54 billion, a 62% increase over the year-ago quarter, according to FactSet, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Revenues for the year ago quarter were $1.57 billion and operating income was $195 million.

Amazon's enormous cloud computing business has taken the IT world by storm and has been so successful, that unit leader Andy Jassy was given a promotion, the title of CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), earlier this month.

Then again, AWS now faces more competitors than ever before including Microsoft, Google and, recently, Oracle. So some questioned how long the company can hold its dominant position and keep growing at this huge pace.

Short answer: a little while longer.

Last quarter, Amazon said its cloud business was on track to reach $10 billion this year.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.