SmugMug has told the world how much money they’ve saved using S3, and at the Web 2.0 Expo, Jeff Bezos told us how his aerospace company, Blue Origin spent only $304 using S3 to deliver half a million copies of the video of their test launch. Jeff also mentioned that S3 is now hosting 5 billion data items for its customers. He also told us that on S3’s peak day, there were 920 million requests for getting or putting objects. The peak second had 16,000 requests. But he didn’t tell us how much storage space those 5 billion objects take up (which would also tell us how much money S3 is taking in at its 15 cents per gigabyte per month) or many other things that inquiring minds would like to know.
We believe that Amazon’s S3 and EC2 are shaping up to be really important. We’re hearing anecdotally from a lot of people who are using these services, but we’d love to gather more data. In particular, we have a feature in our Release 2.0 Newsletter called “The Number”, in which we do a quantitative drill down on some aspect of new technology. In this month’s issue, we explore the controversy about just how much activity there is in Second Life; in the next, we’d love to explore the uptake of S3, and just what it means for both Amazon and the rest of us.
And to do that, we need your help. We’d love to hear from anyone who is using S3 and EC2, but we’re especially interested in hearing from folks who are willing to share their numbers and to work with us on analyzing them. Let us know in the comments or send mail to jimmy at guterman.com. (Jimmy is the editor of the Release 2.0 newsletter.)