AWS earnings Q2 2018

Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services.

Amazon on Thursday said that its cloud business grew nearly 48.9 percent in the second quarter, coming in above analysts’ expectations.

The growth keeps Amazon’s cloud solidly ahead of its closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, as well as smaller players like Oracle and international challengers like Alibaba.

In the quarter, Amazon said, its Amazon Web Services business generated $6.11 billion in revenue, above the FactSet analyst consensus of $6.01 billion.

AWS’ revenue growth rate went up just a bit from the previous quarter, when it showed 48.7 percent growth.

The cloud gave Amazon 11.5 percent of its revenue in the second quarter. A year ago, AWS contributed 10.8 percent of the revenue Amazon collected as a whole in that period.

And AWS has become crucial to Amazon’s profitability. In this quarter AWS’ operating income totaled $1.64 billion, which was above the $1.47 billion FactSet consensus and 55 percent of all of Amazon’s operating income.

In the second quarter, AWS responded to criticism over government use of its Rekognition tool for image recognition, cut the prices of some computing resources and introduced tools to help developers build applications with blockchain technology.

AWS has grown considerably since its core computing and storage services debuted in 2006. In the past three years alone, the revenue it brings in in a year’s time has risen 255 percent.

“We remain confident that AWS revenue can double to $42 billion by 2020 based on current cloud momentum and new products,” KeyBanc analysts led by Edward Yruma wrote in a Monday note.