
Amazon S3 - Bigger and Busier Than Ever - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/amazon-s3-bigger-and-busier-than-ever.html
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saurik
I'm pretty certain that I store almost a billion objects into S3 every month
(yes: the requests for that cost a lot)... does that make me a noticeable
percentage of S3's object count? Seriously now?

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jimmybot
Don't keep us in suspense, what are you storing?

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saurik
I wish it was interesting, or even sane... one day my website got like a
million more users /that day/ and every database mechanism I had to do some of
the user statistics I was keeping totally failed: the website ground to a
halt. So, rather than decide what I really wanted to keep, I frantically
developed a little library that stored all of that data into S3 as a giant
key/value store, with my own little makeshift inverted indexes. Needless to
say, this was stupid, and when I next checked my S3 bills I noticed I was
doing a billion puts per month (which costs like $10,000). Lukily, this has
only been a few months, and I'm now fixing the situation during a giant cost-
cotti g endeavor... but yeah: omg that was stupid.

(typed on my iPhone and therefore a little shortened: hacker news comments
suck on the iPhone)

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jimmybot
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm a packrat myself, but I guess something
like S3 where you actively pay for storage and transport shows you very
clearly the cost of being a packrat--there may be value in what you keep
around, but it's not free to keep around, and it's not free to move it to
storage.

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marcamillion
Is it just me, or does this post leave you a bit confused. What does 292
billion objects mean? I know an object is a file stored in a bucket.

But rly? If Amazon wants to convince developers to use their platform they
have to speak in terms that ordinary people can understand.

Tell us how much money developers have saved since they switched - how many
individual apps are using S3, etc.

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Groxx
Looking at it from a bit more of a critical view than their graph would
probably appreciate, that means that from the end of 2007 on they've done a
little better than doubling yearly.

That's it? They're an _enormous_ company and seem to me to be by _far_ the
most-mentioned storage option. I'm surprised they're not a heck of a lot
higher, especially given that a number of very popular cloud services sit
right on top of S3 and store many gigabytes and _hammer_ it with requests.

Oh well. If they maintain that growth, they'll own everything soon enough. I
don't mean to imply yearly-doubling is _bad_ in any way, just that I would've
expected more by now.

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turbodog
Is cloud storage the factor that is driving companies to AWS? I'm sure that's
huge for NetFlix, but they are an outlier. My bet would be on EC2 usage as
being a better growth metric.

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Groxx
Well, to pick a high-profile AWS-user here: all of Dropbox runs on S3, and
apparently a bit of EC2, last I saw. Not that I think they account for a truly
significant amount of Amazon's traffic, but they're not small-time either.

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ashleyw
Off-topic: I've always wondered who 'Jeff' is on the AWS blog…I like to think
it's Bezos, but is it?

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axomhacker
It's Jeff Barr, Lead AWS Evangelist.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeffbarr> (the OP). <http://www.jeff-
barr.com/?page_id=670>

edit: Barr, not Bar :(

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jeffbarr
Yes, that's me, but with two r's.

When I started writing the AWS blog in late 2004 I wasn't sure how personal I
should or could be, and didn't know if it was ok to brand it with my full
name. I had adopted "-- Jeff;" as my signature a long time ago, when one of my
friends had "++md;"

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sandipagr
wow the growth is phenomenal! Everything is indeed going to be in the cloud

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mikeknoop
It is kind of funny, right? I mean, our servers are already "the cloud". So
it's a really cloud within a cloud.

