AWS S3: How Cheap Hard Drives Power a Massively Scalable Storage System

This article unveils the astounding scale and underlying technology of Amazon S3. S3 leverages inexpensive HDDs, overcoming the limitations of slow random I/O through massive parallelization, erasure coding, and clever load balancing techniques (like the 'power of two choices'). This enables millions of requests per second, ultra-high throughput, and exceptional availability. S3's data storage strategy incorporates random data placement, continuous rebalancing, and the smoothing effect of scale to avoid hot spots. Parallelization at the user, client, and server levels further boosts performance. Ultimately, S3 has evolved from a backup and image storage service to a foundational component of big data analytics and machine learning infrastructures.