Amazon Simple Storage Service Hits One Trillion Stored Objects

Amazon’s Jeff Barr described that landmark number in vivid terms on the Amazon Web Services blog.

“That's 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our Galaxy,” Barr wrote. “If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.”

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The company said it has made deleting files easier with its Object Expiration feature, which helps remove objects after a pre-defined time period and which has deleted more than 125 billion objects since its release at the end of 2011.

Still, AS3 continues to grow. “In other words, even though we've made it easier to delete objects, the overall object count has continued to grow at a very rapid clip,” Barr wrote.

Amazon S3 ended 2011 with more than 762 billion objects stored, showing year-over-year growth of 192 percent.

In February, Amazon cut storage prices by as much as 13.5 percent and said more cuts were coming later this year.

An Amazon partner whose company uses AS3 said the storage service is growing in popularity because of its virtually unlimited capacity and high-performance capabilities.

“S3 is one of the tools we use to increase the speed and performance of many of our client sites,” said Kevin Chu, director of systems and infrastructure at digital marketing firm, Digitaria, a JWT company based in San Diego, Calif. “Because S3 is designed to be highly scalable, we use it to off-load the serving of static content from the Web servers. By freeing up this resource, the Web servers can now concentrate on serving up dynamic content.”

Chu said that when a client, the non-profit organization Invisible Children, was featured on the "Oprah" television program, it was S3 that helped Digitaria off-load most of the heavy digital traffic generated.