Income nearly doubles at Amazon Web Services

Despite the competitive challenges being staged for cloud services from the likes of Google and Microsoft, Amazon continues to astound with the performance of its AWS business that offers retailers and other businesses a means of offloading their data center tasks. The company's latest report shows a 55 percent spike in sales over the year-ago period, reaching $3.2 billion. Employee stock compensation aside, AWS's operating income surged nearly 96 percent to $1.02 billion.