Amazon S3 turns 20 years old on March 14, 2026. Launched in 2006 with a single paragraph announcement, S3 has grown from 1 petabyte across 400 nodes to hundreds of exabytes storing over 500 trillion objects, serving 200 million requests per second. Price dropped ~85% from 15 cents to ~2 cents per gigabyte. Engineering highlights include microservice-based durability auditing, formal methods for correctness proofs, and a multi-year rewrite of performance-critical code in Rust. The post also announces recent expansions: S3 Tables (managed Apache Iceberg), S3 Vectors (native vector storage for RAG/semantic search supporting up to 2 billion vectors per index), and S3 Metadata (centralized metadata for data lakes). AWS's vision is for S3 to become the universal foundation for all data and AI workloads, eliminating the need to move data between specialized systems.
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