Amazon S3, the storage offering from cloud industry giant Amazon Web Services, continues to show staggering growth with the announcement that at the end of the first quarter of 2012, it was storing no less than 905 billion objects. It’s an impressive feat – and it turns up the pressure on competitors and ecosystem partners alike.
In a blog entry, AWS Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions and evangelist-at-large Jeff Barr offers the following chart, visualizing how Amazon S3 has grown over the years.

As you can see, AWS has added 143 billion objects just since January 1st. That’s about how much it grew between 2009 and 2010, just in case you thought the cloud transformation wasn’t accelerating.

Barr writes that a billion objects a day are added by way of the S3 APIs, AWS Import/Export, or AWS Storage Gateway, as well as via Amazon’s backup tools and AWS Direct Connect. At that rate, we’re talking over a trillion objects stored in Amazon’s cloud by year’s end.

The Promise and the Perils of S3

For competitors, that growth means the pressure is on. Enterprise cloud providers are most vulnerable. Their pricing, the demands of the channel and the legacy infrastructure just makes their model more difficult to sell.  On the flip side, these are companies that know how to sell services and the knowledge to extend existing infrasrtucture.

Meanwhile, AWS partners like Eucalyptus Systems boast of their commitment to compatibility with the aforementioned Amazon S3 APIs – and this near-ubiquity may force competitors to do the same.

The conflict may go beyond philosophy, though. Something I hear more and more is this fear (ungrounded in facts, so far as I know, but fear nonetheless) that Amazon may close off its APIs after crushing the competition, leaving its partners in the lurch. But obviously, that fear hasn’t translated into slowing momentum around the Amazon Web Services platform, if this announcement is anything to go by.