Amazon S3 launched in 2006. By 2013 it held two trillion objects; by 2021, over a hundred trillion.

It is the substrate under a remarkable amount of this series — routing tiles, video segments, email attachments, Kafka’s tiered storage. Every time an earlier design said “put it in object storage and forget about it,” this is what it was leaning on.

So the interesting question is: how do you promise eleven nines of durability on hardware that fails constantly?