Everyone knows what AWS S3 is, but few comprehend the massive scale it operates at, nor what it took to get there.
In essence - it’s a scalable multi-tenant storage service with APIs to store and retrieve objects, offering extremely high availability and durability at a relatively low cost.
Scale
400+ trillion objects
150 million requests a second (150,000,000/s)
> 1 PB/s of peak traffic
tens of millions of disks
Behind It All?
Hard drives.
How S3 achieves this scale is an engineering marvel. To understand and appreciate the system, we first must appreciate its core building block - the hard drive.
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