S3 has been the first service Amazon Web Services division released in 2006, and is still the most used public storage service around.

Many of you probably do not even know you are using it. Are you on Dropbox? Well, it runs on S3.

Recently Amazon released a 2011 recap of S3 statistics, and as for the previous years, they are outstanding:

– 762 Billion objects
– peak request at more than 500.000 per second
– +192% growth year over year

A lesson we can learn: data are not easily deleted, and they grow over time. Give people the possibility to save an unlimited amount of data, and they will do it. Keep it in mind when you will design your next file server for your company.