Six years after the service first went live, Amazon’s S3 is approaching 1 trillion objects in storage. In the most recent quarter, the cloud computing service added 143 billion objects, and if the current pace of growth continues, S3 could hit 1.3 trillion objects by the end of the year. According to Amazon’s Jeff Bar, the S3 “routinely” handles 650,000 requests per second, “with occasional peaks substantially above that number.”
As impressive as those numbers are, they may actually indicate a slowing in the rate of growth. In 2009, S3 averaged 15 billion new objects per quarter, climbing to 40 billion per quarter in 2010 and 125 billion per quarter in 2011. If you plot those numbers on a graph, 2012’s 143 billion objects per quarter actually indicates a tapering off of the hockey-stick growth.
