Amazon has released some fairly impressive numbers showcasing the growth of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) over the years. By the end of the first quarter of 2012, there were 905 billion objects stored, and the service routinely handles 650,000 requests per second for those objects, with peaks that go even higher. To put that in perspective, that’s up from 262 billion objects stored just two years ago and up from 762 billion by Q4 2011.
Or maybe it’s more impressive when you look further back: 2.9 billion in 2006, for example. And how fast is it growing? Well, says Amazon, every day, over a a billion objects are added. That’s how fast.
The S3 object counts grows even when Amazon recently added ways to make it easier for objects to leave, including through object expiration and multi-object deletion. The objects are added via S3 APIs, AWS Import/Export, the AWS Storage Gateway, various backup tools, and through Direct Connect pipes.
Note, that the above chart shows Q4 data up until this year, as Amazon only has data up to Q1. So that’s not any sort of slowdown you’re seeing there – by Q4 2012, that number is going to be much, much higher.