Jeff Bezos: AWS will break $10 billion this year — driven by Amazon's failures

Jeff Bezos is bullish on the cloud, pegging AWS' sales for this year at $10 billion in a recent letter to shareholders. But he said there was a surprising source of that success.

"One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins," Bezos wrote. "To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there."

AWS is not one of those failures: Bezos touted customers like GE, Johnson & Johnson and Pinterest while noting that AWS now encompasses 70 different services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things, and enterprise applications. That includes things like Amazon's barebones workmail offering (read how it compares to Microsoft and Google's offerings) as well as its monstrously successful database, storage, and server offerings.

Bezos also noted that their cloud offerings had focused aggressively on cutting prices, with 51 price cuts over the years. Those cuts haven't been able to keep big names like Apple and Dropbox from fleeing for cheaper pastures, but for many businesses, particularly fast growing enterprises, Amazon is still the default cloud option.

Bezos wrote he expected that to remain true for some time — and that Amazon had the potential to capture even more data over time.

"As the team continues their rapid pace of innovation, we’ll offer more and more capabilities to let builders build unfettered, it will get easier and easier to collect, store and analyze data, we’ll continue to add more geographic locations, and we’ll continue to see growth in mobile and 'connected' device applications," he wrote. "Over time, it’s likely that most companies will choose not to run their own data centers, opting for the cloud instead."