Amazon S3 - 905 Billion Objects and 650,000 Requests/Second

At the end of the first quarter of 2012, there were 905 billion objects in Amazon S3. We routinely handle 650,000 requests per second for those objects with occasional peaks substantially above that number. Here is the latest chart:

The S3 object count continued to grow at a rapid clip even after we added object expiration and multi-object deletion at the end of the year.  Every day, well over a billion objects are added via the S3 APIs, AWS Import/Export, the AWS Storage Gateway, all sorts of backup tools, and through Direct Connect pipes.

If you want to work on world-scale distributed systems like S3, we're hiring. Here are some of our open positions:

• Business Development Manager (Luxembourg).
• Business Development Manager - (M/F) (Munich)
• Business Development Manager (Paris)
• Sr. Software Development Engineer (Seattle)
• Software Development Manager (Seattle)
• Systems Engineer (Seattle)
• Senior Product Manager (Seattle)
• Senior Software Development Manager (Seattle)
• Engineering Director (Seattle)

-- Jeff;

 

Comments

[Hughw]

How many of those objects can we access using CORS? On Google Cloud storage, all of them. Why don't you guys wake up?

[Ariel]

Fix your graph - the last column is for 1/4 of a year unlike the others.

[Bryan]

That's because the rest of 2012 hasn't happened yet. The point is that S3 still has rapid object growth after introducing expiration and multi-object deletion. If you assume there is no seasonality and the rate of object growth is steady, then you can estimate S3 will double to ~1500 billion objects by the end of 2012.

[Weg]

The graph gives equal spacing on the X axis to unequally spaced data points. At least use Q1 across all years. And, congratulations on your success!

[Steven]

This growth rate is insane but Amazon S3 service is amazing and haven't had any problems with slow or unresponsive website. I wonder how well other competitors perform comparing to Amazon?

[Toni]

Congratulations on the growth. That said the chart is very confusiong. You should just chart growth by quarter over last 25 quarters...take a look at financial sites.

[Oren]

How do you define an "object"?

[SR]

I had the same question as to how do you define an object and I looked up in the S3 FAQs. Interesting to see what these numbers really mean and compared to others. Check out my post at

http://cloudinsight.com/2012/04/amazon-and-its-objects/

[Bucket Explorer]

Congrats to Amazon S3 from Bucket Explorer Team.