Amazon S3 Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects

Amazon Web Services has quietly passed an interesting benchmark: the company's S3 storage service now hosts more than 100 billion objects. This factoid was noted this morning at Data Center World, when keynote speaker Brian Lillie of Equinix said that Amazon now is hosting 102 billion objects in S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Over the past year, the number of objects stored on S3 has grown from 54 billion to 100 billion, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who mentioned this startling growth curve in his recent presentation at the Cebit computer trade show in Germany.

It's a fuzzy milestone, to be sure, as we don't know how much infrastructure is required to store those 100 billion objects, or how much revenue Amazon is generating from them. But in an industry where we're used to big numbers, 100 billion is an eye-popping total. By any measure, that's a huge storage cloud, and likely a sign of things to come.