Amazon Web Services sales and support teams are currently “spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy.”

So said Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy in his annual letter to shareholders published last week.”

“In AWS, like all our businesses, we’re not trying to optimize for any one quarter or year,” the CEO explained. Instead, all of Amazon is “trying to build customer relationships (and a business) that outlast all of us; and as a result, our AWS sales and support teams are spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy.”

“Many of these AWS customers tell us that they’re not cost-cutting as much as cost-optimizing so they can take their resources and apply them to emerging and inventive new customer experiences they’re planning,” he added. “Customers have appreciated this customer-focused, long-term approach, and we think it’ll bode well for both customers and AWS.”

“While these short-term headwinds soften our growth rate, we like a lot of the fundamentals that we’re seeing in AWS,” Jassy added. Those fundamentals include “robust” pipelines for new customers and active migrations.

“Many companies use discontinuous periods like this to step back and determine what they strategically want to change, and we find an increasing number of enterprises opting out of managing their own infrastructure, and preferring to move to AWS