Amazon S3 Cloud Storage Hosts 1 Trillion Objects

It seemed like just the other day (OK, it was 2006) we were writing about Amazon launching its cloud-based Simple Storage Service and wondering whether it would be "a disruptive force or non-event." The question was answered quickly, as Amazon S3 became the Carl Sagan of cloud metrics, adding billions and billions of objects. Now, barely six years after its launch, it has grown beyond that range.

Today Amazon's Jeff Barr reported that S3 now houses more than 1 trillion objects. "That's 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our Galaxy," Jeff notes. "If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all."

Recently the object count at Amazon S3 has been growing by up to 3.5 billion objects in a single day (that's over 40,000 new objects per second).