How S3 scales to petabytes a second on top of tens of millions of slow HDDs
how AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDsLearn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drivesStanislav KozlovskiSep 24, 20255ShareEveryone 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 availability1 and durability2 at a relatively low cost3.Scale400+ trillion4 objects150 million requests a second (150,000,000/s)> 1 PB/s of peak traffictens of millions of disksBehind 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 -…
