Amazon’s S3 object count kisses 1 trillion

It began so small, an insignificant 200,000 objects, with the 2006 launch of the easy Storage Service (S3) object storage companion to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute cloud. Six years later, and Amazon’s infrastructure cloud is on the point of handily bust through 1 trillion objects under management.

In a blog post , Jeff Barr, on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure unit, says that the S3 service contained 905 billion objects as of the top of the primary quarter. This is often an excellent variety of files for any single entity to accommodate.

Perhaps more significantly, the height variety of requests that the S3 service is fielding is now at 650,000 requests per second, with occasional peaks going even higher.

Amazon has kept the S3 data a little bit near its chest through the years, but here’s what the Q1 2012 data appears like against the information from the fourth quarter from annually because the S3 service was launched:

El Reg has poked around gathering up other data points here and there during the last year, and now we have assembled more quarterly data concerning the S3 service than Barr installed his blog. Every point with a blue diamond is an exact data point for that quarter within the chart below. We fit the curve as best shall we between the dots.

The petering out of the S3 object growth within the first quarter was definitely partly because of the launch of object expiration and multi-object deletion , either one of which came out in December 2011.

Barr says that each day AWS import/export, the S3 storage gateway, the S3 APIs, Direct Connect pipes, and numerous backup tools that work with S3 are adding “well over one thousand million objects” per day.

Actually, it’s in the direction of 1.57 billion an afternoon within the first quarter of this year, for those who do the mathematics at the Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 data and average over the times.

In a way, by offering the automated file retirement services, Amazon chopped off the handle of this hockey stick curve. This can make the S3 service look less impressive with regards to straight math however it also makes S3 a more useful service and hence more appealing to customers who shell out bucks to exploit Amazon’s disk drives rather than their very own.

Amazon has not given out peak file request data as frequently because the object count, but here’s what we all know. Back within the first quarter of 2009, Amazon said S3 was peaking at around 70,000 file requests per second, and in some customer presentations Amazon said it hit 200,000 peak requests per second within the second quarter of 2011.

We were told earlier this year once we did a story at the S3 ramp that it was peaking at 370,000 requests per second, and now it has rocketed as much as 650,000 requests per second.

So at the same time as the service is now automagically retiring files to the bit bucket, the quantity of requests is on an overly fast ramp indeed. It’d be interesting to work out what the bandwidth is at the S3 cloud, and what kind of money it generates.

Show me the money

And where is the comparable EC2 data?

Amazon doesn’t, for sure, discuss the dough that AWS generates within the aggregate or for any particular service individually.

In the primary nine months of 2011, Amazon posted $30.6bn in sales (up 44.2 per cent) while any other category, where AWS and diverse other unspecified gross sales get parked in Amazon’s financials, accounted for $1.08bn in sales (up 70.4 per cent).

Assume that once Amazon reports its final 2011 quarter the opposite category is around $1.5bn, and perhaps three quarters of the revenue is AWS. If those assumptions are correct, then AWS has already broken through $1bn in annual sales.

If that were the case, AWS would still only be about three per cent of revenue, but what percentage IT departments on earth are earning money rather then spending money?

The interesting question is that this: Are the millions of EC2, S3, and other AWS service users now giving Amazon enough money to apply its data center to pay for Amazon’s own usage out of the profits? ®

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