Clouds in the forecast: Amazon S3 grew 192% year-over-year

Keep your eyes to sky because clouds are in the forecast. Amazon Web Services has reported massive growth for its number of objects stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), with a 192 percent increase year-over-year.

Amazon Web Services is by far the most popular cloud infrastructure provider in the world, so measuring the number of objects stored in S3 can help us quantify just how ubiquitous the service is. Jeff Barr, Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions at Amazon, wrote in a company blog Monday night that at the end of 2011, there were 762 billion objects stored in Amazon S3. That’s 500 billion more objects than were stored at the end of 2010.

Barr also noted that Amazon Web Services now processes over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times. A year ago, Amazon S3 had a peak request rate slightly above 200,000 requests a second.

“Where are all of these objects coming from?” Barr wrote. “Although we definitely made it easier for you to delete objects using Multi-Object Deletion and Object Expiration, we also gave you plenty of ways to upload new objects using Multipart upload, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Import/Export.”