AWS News Blog

Amazon S3 – Busier Than Ever

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Amazon S3 usage has grown very nicely in the last quarter and now stands at 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion just a quarter ago. As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that’s over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!

Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second.

All of this usage drives increasing economies of scale, or (in plain English) lower costs. I am happy to say that, effective November 1st, 2008, a new tiered pricing model for Amazon S3 storage will go in to effect. The new model features four price tiers, with prices decreasing based on the amount of storage used by each customer. Here is a full breakdown:

Tier US EU Description
0-50 TB $0.150/GB $0.180/GB First 50 TB per month of storage used
50-100 TB $0.140/GB $0.170/GB Next 50 TB per month of storage used
100-500 TB $0.130/GB $0.160/GB Next 400 TB per month of storage used
500+ TB $0.120/GB $0.150/GB Storage used per month over 500 TB

Customers large, small, and in-between have put S3 to all sorts of uses. Here are a few that you might find interesting:

Ng_topo National Geographic’s topo.com site stores seamless image maps for the entire United States in S3. You’ll need to register in order to see the maps.

Oracle_backup_wp Oracle Secure Backup now includes a Cloud Module which supports direct, multi-threaded backup to S3.

— Jeff;

PS – We’ll be updating the AWS Calculator when the new pricing model goes in to effect.

Modified 11/09/2020 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
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Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.