Amazon flexes its cloud muscle: Now storing 2 trillion objects in S3

Amazon’s cloud services arm is a giant that towers almost all competitors offering similar services. It looks like that reputation will continue to stick with the announcement that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing two trillion objects in the cloud.

S3 is used by many developers and companies for scalable and relatively cheap cloud infrastructure. Last June, Amazon announced that S3 had hit one trillion objects stored. That was a big milestone at the time. And now it has doubled that amount in less than a year.

“I’m pleased to announce that there are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second,” Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, wrote in a blog post today. “It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number.”

While Amazon has a big lead in the cloud infrastructure space, it faces a lot of heavy competition, especially from Rackspace, Microsoft, Google, and SoftLayer. This week, Microsoft opened up its Azure infrastructure product in general availability, and it made the commitment to match Amazon’s prices on services such as compute, storage, and bandwidth.

Photo credit: Jeff Attaway/Flickr