Breaking: Amazon S3 Turns 20, Hits 500 Trillion Objects Stored
Amazon Web Services announced today that Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has quietly celebrated its 20th anniversary since public launch on March 14, 2006. As of March 2026, S3 now stores more than 500 trillion objects, serving over 200 million requests per second across hundreds of exabytes of data globally. The price has dropped approximately 85% since launch, to just over 2 cents per gigabyte.
“Twenty years is worth pausing to celebrate,” said Sébastien Stormacq, AWS Principal Developer Advocate, in a detailed retrospective post. “What began as a simple object storage service has grown into something far larger in scope and scale, defining cloud infrastructure itself.”
New Account Regional Namespaces for S3 Buckets
Alongside the anniversary, AWS launched a new S3 feature: account regional namespaces for general purpose buckets. Customers can now create buckets within their own account regional namespace by appending a unique suffix, ensuring bucket names are reserved exclusively for their account. This can be enforced across organizations using IAM policies and AWS Organizations SCPs via the new s3:x-amz-bucket-namespace condition key.
“This feature gives customers guaranteed uniqueness and control over their bucket naming,” explained Channy Yun, AWS Senior Developer Advocate. “It’s a direct response to long-standing customer requests for more predictable namespace management.”
Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver Now Generally Available
AWS also announced the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver, an internet-reachable anycast DNS resolver. Available across 30 AWS Regions, it supports both IPv4 and IPv6 queries, providing DNS resolution for authorized clients from any location — not just within a VPC or Region.
“I wrote about the preview at re:Invent 2025, and I am thrilled to see it reach general availability,” said Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist. “This service extends DNS resolution to authorized clients anywhere, with built-in filtering against malicious domains, DNS tunneling, and Domain Generation Algorithms.” Global Resolver now also includes protection against Dictionary DGA threats.
Background
Amazon S3 launched in 2006 as one of the first cloud object storage services. Over 20 years, it has become the de facto standard for cloud storage, used by startups, enterprises, and governments worldwide. The price per gigabyte has fallen from over 15 cents to just over 2 cents, an 85% reduction, while performance and durability have only increased.
Route 53 Global Resolver builds on AWS’s existing DNS infrastructure. During preview at re:Invent 2025, it demonstrated anycast resolution for public and private domains. Now GA, it adds centralized query logging and enhanced threat detection.
What This Means
For customers, S3’s continued innovation and price reduction means cloud storage remains cost-effective at massive scale. The new account regional namespaces solve the “bucket name squatting” problem, giving organizations guaranteed naming rights. This will simplify migration and multi-account strategies.
Route 53 Global Resolver addresses a critical security gap: DNS resolution for remote or mobile clients outside traditional VPCs. By anycast, it provides low-latency, secure DNS anywhere, reducing attack surface. The addition of DGA threat protection makes it a stronger choice for enterprise security teams.
Other Launches Last Week
- Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime: Now supports stateful Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for agents.
- Additional updates in compute, networking, and AI services were also rolled out.
AWS continues to accelerate its pace of innovation, with over 200 new features and services announced in March 2026 alone.