Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011
Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year. — “As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second …
Context & Ripple Effects
S3 began as a standalone storage service in 2006 and was already described as handling heavier demand in 2008. The 2011 figures turn that earlier operating trajectory into evidence that AWS can run object storage at internet-scale volume.
AWS has also used free EC2 micro-instances to lower the barrier to cloud adoption and expanded Direct Connect to additional locations. High S3 usage gives those compute and connectivity efforts a larger shared customer base.
First-order effects
- Amazon Web Services gains a public scale signal for S3: 762 billion stored objects and more than 500,000 requests per second demonstrate that the service is supporting a large active workload base.
- S3 customers gain stronger evidence that AWS is operating storage infrastructure at volumes beyond an individual enterprise deployment.
Second-order effects
- AWS can make its EC2 trials and Direct Connect expansion more persuasive as complements to an already heavily used storage layer, encouraging customers to place compute, network access, and data storage within the same platform.
- Storage providers competing for application workloads face a sharper requirement to demonstrate both scale and sustained request handling, rather than competing only on raw capacity.
Third-order effects
- If storage, compute, and dedicated connectivity continue to reinforce one another, cloud competition shifts toward integrated infrastructure operations, where the harder advantage is running the combined system reliably at scale.
- The workload bottleneck moves from acquiring storage hardware to moving, organizing, and serving data across shared cloud infrastructure.
The trend: Cloud infrastructure is consolidating around integrated platforms whose operational scale in storage anchors adoption of adjacent compute and networking services.