S3 20b 100tkrazitprotocol: It’s hard to imagine how much easier it can possibly be. Honestly, what are you waiting for?
Amazon’s cloud storage service S3 is 15 years old this year and has scaled to store 100T objects by 2020. In other words, the future is now. What was once impossible is now possible with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which permits developers and system administrators around the globe from all walks of life to run more intelligent software at a fraction of the cost.
S3 is Amazon’s answer to bringing order to the massive infrastructures of the web. In a conversation with ZDNet, S3 Product Manager Andy Jassy explained that S3 was born out of necessity.
“We were looking at what customers were saying about how they were hosting their data,” said Jassy in an interview with ZDNet. “What became abundantly clear was there was a massive gap between what people thought their storage bills should be and what their actual storage bills turned out to be. And there was also a massive gap on how they thought they were storing their data and how they were actually storing it.”
The problem with data storage systems at the turn of the century was that servers were only able to store around 10 MB, or roughly 10,000 books of 200 pages.
“You may want to write a book, but you don’t know that you’re going to write it yet,” explained Jassy. “This is what customers experienced with their storage systems. There was a real gap between what they were expecting and what they actually were getting.”
The advent of the World Wide Web in 1994 paved the way for a greater demand for data storage. Around that time, there weren’t as many high-capacity servers to store all of this new data. So users began using websites stored on their home computers and then rehosted them on other computers when they began to get flooded.
“There were a lot of difficulties with the people who were hosting the data,” said Jassy. “But more importantly was that there was no actual storage to back up their data.”
S3’s Vast Potential for Growth Future
Now, 15 years after its launch in 2000, S3 has a vast potential for growth in the future. At present, S3 is used by every Fortune 500 company and hundreds of other companies around the globe.
“It’s one of the largest systems in Amazon’s data centers by far,” said Jassy. “We have around over 100,000 servers in S3 globally to back up the photos and videos and music and emails and documents.”
And that strategy is going to have a lot of promise in the next few decades — especially as traffic continues to increase. According to Jassy, S3 stores over 100T objects per day, serving more than 25B requests a month.
“So there’s a ton of growth in the way we store data,” said Jassy. “But even more importantly, is the immense amount of growth in the ways people access and use data.”
Your IT needs to be aware of all the new technologies that will fundamentally shift our business processes and organization for years to come. To stay ahead of the game, you need to understand what changes are coming — and where they will occur.
