Amazon S3 – 2 Trillion Objects, 1.1 Million Requests/Second

How about comparing to the lifetime of one person? With the US average life expectancy (78 years) that means you'd have to upload 800 objects/second for your whole life to get to 2 trillon :)

Edit: One S3 object for each fish in the ocean (3 to 4 trillion) could also be a nice future milestone (if also slightly underwhelming :)

Edit2: I also love the eye blink as a unit of time. Each time you blink (average is around 15 times a minute), XXX more objects will have been uploaded to/requested on S3

Now imagine putting 9 999 people behind every person.

And finally, imagine stacking 9 999 on each of these million people's head. That's twice the height a normal airplane flies at.

Then double that number. That's how many objects have been created so far.

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A bit long, but I think the roughly human scale numbers, 999s and even more effect makes it almost imaginable.

EDIT: Another one - you could fill the whole of manhattan with cents and still have money to spare.

(Manhattan is 87.46 km^2 and a coin is less than about 40mm^2)

Not least people will have seen the many, many visualisations of that figure. :P

A typical grain of beach sand – which must be about the lightest solid thing that’s easy for most people to envision – is 3 mg. That many grains of sand would mass 6e6 kg (6000 metric tons), which in turn is near the upper limit of masses that make sense to most people in everyday terms.

So you could say that if every S3 object were a grain of sand, S3 would be 3× the launch mass of the Space Shuttle, or somewhat more than the gold held in Fort Knox, or as much as the heaviest living thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

And the the 1.1 million requests per second would be about 3.3 kg, or as much as a gallon of milk/water.

In fact, even if you and all your friends spent your lives reading the lists of object names, you wouldn't have time to get to the end.

In fact, even if you and all your friends and all of their friends devoted your lives to reading lists of S3 object names, you wouldn't even make a dent because new objects are arriving faster than you could collectively read their names.

(1 card is 0.11cm x 0.15cm x 0.01cm, 32GB. 32k objects, 31.2M cards needed. 165 cm x 165 cm x 165cm = 110 * 150 * 1650 cards = 27.2M. Instead of 165cm which is 5 and a half feet, say 6 feet, so try 166 * 122 * 1829 = 37.04M, enough to use some error-correcting codes just in case.)

2000000000000 - (.99999999999 * 2000000000000) = 20

Makes me feel pretty OK about having backups there.

(At one point, the stuff I was storing/logging for Cydia actually represented over a percent, maybe it was even over two percent, of all objects in S3; now I'm between 0.1% and 0.5%.)

1.1M RPS is the amount they actually serve, not how much they can serve. Just because your single server can serve more than 1,000 static objects/second (in fact, that number should be much higher), it doesn't mean you need to.