Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service hits 1 trillion files

June 12, 2012 11:09 AM PDT

Amazon’s Jeff Barr noted this morning that its S3 online storage service reached 1 trillion objects, or files, last week, impressive growth for a service that launched in 2006.

Barr writes at the company’s Amazon Web Services blog :

That’s 142 objects for everyone on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for each star in our galaxy. In the event you could count one object per second it might take you 31,710 years to count all of them.

He added that the article count have been growing by as much as 3.5 billion objects overnight, or approximately 40,000 new objects per second. In its first year , it took the corporate many months to peer that much growth; its latest announcement was 905 billion objects in April.

All this, despite an object expiration feature that has removed some 125 billion objects because it was launched late last year. “In other words, even if we’ve made it easier to delete objects, the whole object count has continued to grow at an extraordinarily rapid clip,” Barr writes.

Impressive stuff.

Amazon’s mission for S3 (Simple Storage Service) is to make scalable, secure, and fast computing easier for developers by letting them store and retrieve any amount of information, at any time, from anywhere on the internet. (Who would wish the sort of thing? Web applications providers, media content providers, data analysis fiends, and those that deserve to backup and archive data for disaster recovery.)

By flexing the muscle of its extensive cloud infrastructure, Amazon seeks to pass along the advantages of economies of scale to S3 customers. Each new milestone underscores its point and drives down the associated fee-per-terabyte for the client. “Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness,” it says.

This story was first published as “Amazon S3 hits 1000000000000 objects” at ZDNet’s Between the Lines .