Amazon S3 Storing 29 Billion Objects

Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Service reports that Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is now storing more than 29 billion, an increase of 7 billion from the previous quarter. "As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that's over 4 objects for every person now on Earth," Jeff writes. At peak usage, S3 is handling more than 70,000 requests per second.

So what's next? Amazon is lowering prices on S3 storage, with a new four-tier pricing plan that takes effect on Nov. 1. Customers storing more than 500 terabytes will get a rate of 12 cents per gigabyte.

When Amazon S3 was launched in March 2006, we wondered whether it would be a disruptive force or non-event. "It’s too early to say whether S3 (and the similar services that will certainly follow) is the start of something big or an experiment," I wrote at the time. With 29 billion storage objects, it's definitely something big.