# How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs

<https://bigdata.2minutestreaming.com/p/how-aws-s3-scales-with-tens-of-millions-of-hard-drives>

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## What Jamie wrote

The scale of S3 is really hard to understand even for technologists who have worked on very scaled systems.

> AWS S3 is a massively multi-tenant storage service. It's a gigantic distributed system consisting of many individually slow nodes that on aggregate allow you to access data faster than any single node can provide. S3 achieves this through:
> 
> - massive parallelization across the end-to-end path (user, client, server)
> - neat load-balancing tricks like the power of two random
> - spreading out data via erasure coding
> - lowering tail latency via hedge requests
> - the economies of multi-tenancy at world scale

This article is a very approachable overview on the key methods they use to hit this performance.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT328: Weekly Thing 328 / Agents, Pulse, Vision](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/328/), Notable

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