In my previous article on Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), I discussed the notion that AWS might not yet be profitable. With the release of Amazon's Q1 report, it became clear that this is far from the truth. Not only is the segment growing revenue rapidly, but it is actually turning a decent profit. This is in spite of Amazon's aggressive approach to pricing and its relatively slim margins. This is a serious problem from other companies in the cloud space, and may force them to also break out the specifics of their cloud divisions as well as lower their prices. Breaking out the AWS numbers is a thinly-veiled challenge to competitors to do the same, most of which maintain a rather murky way of disclosing their cloud revenue growth rates, let alone actual profits. For example, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) lumps all of its cloud offerings together, making comparisons between its own Azure infrastructure service and competing products such as AWS difficult. Some analysts maintain that Azure is actually far smaller than the overall cloud numbers would suggest. IBM (NYSE:IBM) has a similarly opaque way of describing its cloud business, also lumping its "as-a-service" offerings together. Read more