

Amazon storing more than 449 billion objects in S3 - bbr
http://gigaom.com/cloud/amazon-storing-more-than-449-billion-objects-in-s3/

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cemerick
At what point does S3 break?

Very happy user of S3 and much of the rest of AWS here, but I can't help but
ask (mostly rhetorically).

S3 is presumably the largest system of its kind ever; it's not clear to me
what its failure modes, thresholds, or weak links might be as it continues to
grow. Anything from a breakdown in the dynamo architecture to hard
infrastructure limits to failures in operations and management strike me as
plausible. What will we see first: data loss, increases in latency, repeated
catastrophic outages, or "other"?

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cemerick
Getting some feedback/insight on this topic seemed interesting enough to me
that I wrote a slightly-expanded post separately:

<http://cemerick.com/2011/07/20/at-what-point-does-s3-break/>

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moe
I'm curious what their storage capacity is.

Assuming an average object size of 100kb that would amount to 45 petabytes
(plus redundancy). But I have no idea what their average object size is...

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diolpah
We have a few million objects stored in S3 and our average object size is only
~40k.

Plenty of people use cloudfront as a streaming CDN, though. Those assets would
be far larger, obviously.

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saurik
Previous link to the actual source (posted here by an Amazon employee):
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2783595>

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alexro
If DropBox continue to grow, so will S3

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charlesju
I am calling it here. 1 trillion objects by 2013.

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bdr
That's a linear extrapolation from the last two data points on the graph, but
it seems to be growing super-linearly.

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jeffbarr
I work for Amazon (and wrote the blog post referenced by GigaOm), and I
certainly won't speculate (or place a bet). However, note that the growth from
262 billion to 449 billion objects took place in 6 months.

