How AWS S3 achieves petabyte-scale throughput using commodity hard drives
By
todsacerdoti
A baker's-dozen of insight crammed into one ring.
Summary
This article explores the engineering behind AWS S3's massive scale, explaining how Amazon built a distributed storage system capable of serving 1 petabyte per second and 150 million queries per second using commodity hard disk drives (HDDs). It details the architectural innovations that allow S3 to achieve high availability, durability, and low cost despite relying on HDDs—an older, slower technology compared to SSDs. The piece highlights the trade-offs and design decisions that made S3 the backbone of modern cloud infrastructure.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledHow S3 achieves this scale is an engineering marvel.
Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) are an old, somewhat out-of-favor technology largely superseded by SSDs.
It's a scalable multi-tenant storage service with APIs to store and retrieve objects, offering extremely high availability and durability at a relatively low cost.
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