Cloud-tastic: Amazon S3 surpasses one trillion objects stored

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than one trillion objects for its cloud customers, the company announced Tuesday in a blog post.

The S3 service is used by many developers and engineers for scalable and relatively cheap cloud-based infrastructure. Back in early April, S3 announced that it was storing 905 billion objects, so it only took a matter of months for the service to add another 100 billion. And that growth continues even as Amazon makes it easier to delete objects.

“Lately, we’ve seen the object count grow by up to 3.5 billion objects in a single day (that’s over 40,000 new objects per second),” Jeff Barr, Amazon Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions, wrote on the blog. Our customers have taken advantage of S3’s relatively new object expiration feature and have used it to delete over 125 billion objects since we released it at the end of last year. In other words, even though we’ve made it easier to delete objects, the overall object count has continued to grow at a very rapid clip.”

In describing just how big 1 trillion objects is, Barr writes: “That’s 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our Galaxy. If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.”

That’s a lot of cloud.

Clouds photo: Nicholas A. Tonelli/Flickr