In a recent Amazon Web Service Blog, It is quoted that Amazon S3 has reached over 762 billion objects at the end of 2011. We have been following Amazon S3’s growth closely. As usual, we will plug the numbers in an Excel spread-sheet and see its growth in a chart.

Double Every 8 Months

As shown in the chart, you can see the numbers fit into an exponential trend line pretty well. Worked out the math, the Amazon S3 objects double every 8 months.

How to use Amazon S3?

If you never used Amazon S3 before, It is OK because you may never need to directly interface Amazon S3. You may be using Amazon S3 indirectly through some online storage services, where quite many are powered by Amazon S3.

If you want to use Amazon S3 directly, so you feel there is less distance between you and your data, there are many ways too.

Use Case 1 – Direct Web Browser Access

You can have direct web browser access at aws.amazon.com. There is a web-based AWS management console that you can use.

Use Case 2 – Virtual Drive Access

You can have a drive letter in Windows Explorer, where the drive letter contains your Amazon S3 data that you can do drag and drop upload/download. Gladinet Cloud Desktop is a very handy program to help mount Amazon S3 buckets as folders in Windows Explorer.

Use Case 3 – Team Collaboration

In Use Case 1, when you have direct web-based access, you can have multiple team members collaborate on certain team folders. However, the interface is almost too simple for the collaboration purpose.  You can use Gladinet Cloud for Teams, together with your own Amazon S3 bucket for this purpose. You can have dedicated team folders, sync and share functionalities and so on, using your own Amazon S3 bucket as the storage.

Use Case 4 – File Server Network Share

You can extend your file server with external Amazon S3 storage. This way, you can publish network shares based on Amazon S3. Gladinet Cloud Server will be good for this purpose.

Use Case 5 – Different Ways of Backup

Backup could be the most mature application for online storage. You can use Amazon S3 for backup purpose. Backup is built into both Gladinet Cloud Desktop and Gladinet Cloud Server. From either product, you can do mirror backup, snapshot backup and etc.

Anyway, if you are amazed by S3’s exponential growth, and want to try it out, Gladinet has many products and solutions to help.

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