Amazon S3 to exceed one trillion stored objects 'within months'

Cloud services arm also launches online software store, AWS Marketplace, featuring Linux flavours and enterprise giants

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services unit of the global online retailer, has launched AWS Marketplace, an online store where clients can find, buy and deploy software that runs on AWS.

The Marketplace features software from vendors including Computer Associates; Canonical, the producer of Ubuntu Linux; Couchbase, the company behind the open source NoSQL database; security software vendor Check Point Software; IBM; Microsoft; SUSE; Red Hat; SAP and PHP software developer Zend - as well as Wordpress, Drupal and MediaWiki.

The launch was announced this week by Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels at the AWS Summit in New York.

Vogels claims that there are now several hundred thousand businesses across the world running applications, partly or wholly, using AWS. "In the past year and a half, we have seen tremendous growth in enterprises using AWS, and it is in all kinds of industries," said Vogels.

Furthermore, it has enjoyed almost exponential increases in popularity and usage. For example, Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), an online storage web service, can boast just over 900 billion stored objects in the first quarter – a nine-fold increase from the 102 billion claimed by Amazon in March 2010 – and will break through the one trillion mark before the end of the second quarter. At peak periods, it is handling some 650,000 requests for objects, according to Vogels.

In March, Amazon cut AWS prices by up to 40 per cent. That followed complaints from heavy users that the pay-per-use model could be expensive as usage mounted up. The ability for customers to simply "walk away", though, ought to be central to the new model of cloud computing, said Vogel – as opposed to the typical software vendors' model of trying to lock customers in and charging accordingly.

"You, the consumer of these services, should be in full control. That is core to our philosophy. And with that also comes the belief that if you help us gain economies of scale, and if we together operate to get increased efficiencies out of our platform, you should benefit from that," said Vogels.

Vogels joined Amazon in September 2004 as director of systems research after 10 years as a research scientist in the Computer Science Department of Cornell University, mainly conducting research into scalable enterprise systems. He was named chief technology officer in January 2005 and vice president, worldwide architecture in March 2005.