Web 2.0 Expo: Amazon's S3 passes 5 billion objects stored

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo shared the growth numbers for S3, the company's on demand storage service (check out the video clip of his remarks). In July of 2006, S3 held 800,000 million objects. Today the number surpasses 5 billion. The best day so far is 920,847,345 objects added and the peak second record is 16,607 objects, Bezos said.

Infrastructure as a service has arrived.

With SQS, S3, and EC2, and even Mechanical Turk, Amazon is making good on its claim to handle the muck, the undifferentiated heavy lifting at Web scale--infrastructure as a pay-by-the-drink service--10 cents per CPU hour. Customers for Amazon's various infrastructure services include many startups, and even Microsoft. 

"Seventy percent [of creating an application] is things on the back end, and it is similar in almost every Web scale application. None of this stuff helps your idea get any better or gets your product to market faster, but it has to be done at a very high quality level. If not, it can torpedo your successful product...it's the price of admission." You also have to loop through cycles, he added, revising products and the infrastructure. 

Bezos said that Amazon is not making money yet on its infrastructure services. "We are already rapidly deploying new infrastructure, disks and servers, to support [growth]. EC2, for example, is completely capacity constrained and invite only. For S3 Amazon is taking all comers," he said.

"We would like our current customers to get good service before taking on new customers. We are trying to get ourselves into position where we are demand constrained rather than capacity constrained," Bezos said.

Regarding where the infrastructure business fits in, Bezos said, "This is a new incremental business. Our retail and seller facing businesses are doing very well and have very large market sizes."