Amazon: AWS S3 Cloud Storage Now Stores 762 Billion Objects

We can talk revenue growth and run rates and all that until our faces turn blue, but here’s a cloud metric we don’t get too often: The Amazon S3 storage platform from Amazon Web Services contained 762 billion — that’s 762,000,000,000 — objects at the end of 2011. At peak times, wrote AWS’ Jeff Barr in his blog, Amazon S3 handled 500,000 requests per second.

He explained the growth thusly:

Where are all of these objects coming from? Although we definitely made it easier for you to delete objects using Multi-Object Deletion and Object Expiration, we also gave you plenty of ways to upload new objects using Multipart upload, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Import/Export.

And while it’s true that Amazon added plenty of new tools to get important stuff into its cloud, I have to give a TalkinCloud tip of the hat to ReadWriteWeb, which reached out to a handful of analysts for their slightly differentiated takes. Those analysts, whose longer-form responses can be read in ReadWriteWeb’s original article, seem to agree that Amazon S3’s growth just makes it the largest player in a growing cloud storage market.

But I do have to share Cloudscaling co-founder Randy Bias’ reaction from that article to what this could mean for Amazon’s business going forward:

“I don’t understand how people can’t see this kind of thing and just have their jaw hit the floor. People are paying for this. At this rate they will have 2 TRILLION objects in another year and it will be a $600M/year business.”

Amazon Web Services was one of the first on the cloud computing scene. And announcements such as this really reinforce the notion that for better or for worse, AWS is the one to beat and the de facto standard in so many service markets — including cloud storage. That $600 million estimate that Bias came up with is only for Amazon S3, it should be noted, and doesn’t take into account the many other cloud markets AWS has found itself in.

That means that Amazon Web Services may be closer to the $1 billion in annual revenues milestone it’s been seeking for some time. Needless to say, TalkinCloud will keep watching, so make sure you keep watching TalkinCloud.