Use of Amazon's S3 cloud service skyrockets

Amazon has revealed a staggering increase in the use of its S3 cloud product over 2011 that saw the number of objects stored on the service triple to almost one trillion.

According to Amazon there were a huge 762 billion objects stored in Amazon S3 by the end of 2011, up from 262 billion the year before.

"We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” wrote Jeff Barr, a web services evangelist for Amazon, on the company's web service blog.

The service is proving increasingly popular with businesses, such as UK-based social gaming company Playfish, which uses the cloud service to help deliver online games to users across the globe.

Amazon has also been pushing the enterprise capabilities of its S3 service, with the recent launch of its AWS Storage Gateway, which turns S3 into a failover system for on-premise application data.

But it is not just enterprises that have seen the potential of S3.

Researchers at F-Secure recently warned that Facebook spammers had turned to Amazon's S3 to provide a cost-effective platform that could be used to evade some of the social networking giant's counter-spam measures.

Amazon's figures illustrate the growing acceptance of cloud services within the enterprise, a fact not lost of rivals such as Rackspace, which has recently launched its own cloud-based storage service in the UK, called Cloud Files.