How Amazon S3 Stores 350 Trillion Objects with 11 Nines of Durability

Amazon S3 is a highly scalable and durable object storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It has evolved significantly since its launch in 2006, adding features like regional storage, tiered storage, performance and security enhancements, and AI/analytics capabilities.

The architecture of Amazon S3 is designed to handle massive scale, with over 350 trillion objects and 100 million requests per second. It uses a microservices-based approach, with various components responsible for different tasks like request handling, indexing, data placement, and durability/recovery.

The key aspects of the S3 architecture include:

• Front-end request handling services that authenticate users, validate requests, and route them to the appropriate storage nodes
• Indexing and metadata services that track object locations without storing the data itself
• Storage and data placement services that determine where to store objects, apply encryption/compression, and ensure multi-AZ replication
• Read and write optimization services that use techniques like multi-part uploads and prefetching to improve performance
• Durability and recovery services that continuously verify data integrity and automatically repair any issuesAmazon S3 has also evolved its scaling approach over the years, shifting from a reactive model to a proactive, predictive model that uses AI-driven forecasting and automated capacity management.