Amazon S3 Hits 20 Years: 500 Trillion Objects and Counting as AWS Launches Route 53 Global Resolver

Amazon S3 Marks 20 Years with Unprecedented Scale, While Route 53 Global Resolver Goes Live

Amazon S3 celebrated its 20th anniversary on March 14, 2026, with the service now storing more than 500 trillion objects and handling over 200 million requests per second globally. The price has dropped to just over 2 cents per gigabyte, an 85% reduction since launch.

In a simultaneous launch, Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver has reached general availability across 30 AWS Regions, offering anycast DNS resolution with advanced threat protection for authorized clients anywhere.

Background

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) launched publicly on March 14, 2006, as a simple object storage service that defined cloud infrastructure. Over two decades, it has evolved into a foundational component of the internet economy, storing hundreds of exabytes of data.

"What began as a simple object storage service has grown into something far larger in scope and scale," said Sébastien Stormacq, AWS VP of Engineering, in a detailed retrospective. "We've reduced costs by 85% while adding features like account regional namespaces to give customers more control."

Route 53 Global Resolver, previewed at re:Invent in December 2025, is now generally available. It provides internet-reachable anycast DNS resolution for public internet domains and private domains in Route 53 hosted zones, from any location—not just within a specific VPC or Region.

Key Features and Statistics

• S3 Scale: 500+ trillion objects, 200 million requests/second, hundreds of exabytes of data.
• Price Reduction: Over 2 cents per GB, down 85% from launch.
• New S3 Feature: Account regional namespaces for general purpose buckets, ensuring unique bucket name reservation per account.
• Route 53 Global Resolver GA: Available in 30 AWS Regions, supports IPv4 and IPv6, includes DNS query filtering against malicious domains.
• Threat Protection: Blocks DNS tunneling, Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA), and Dictionary DGA threats.

What This Means

For enterprises, these launches signal AWS's commitment to cost-effective, secure, and globally scalable infrastructure. S3's 85% price drop over 20 years makes cloud storage increasingly affordable for data lakes, AI training, and archival purposes.

"Route 53 Global Resolver eliminates the need to manage DNS resolvers across multiple locations," said Channy Yun, AWS Principal Engineer. "Authorized clients anywhere can now get consistent, filtered DNS resolution with centralized logging." This enables organizations to enforce security policies globally without complex networking.

The combination of S3's maturity and Route 53's new resolver gives AWS customers a more cohesive foundation for building global applications with unified DNS and object storage.

Additional Launches

Alongside these major announcements, AWS also released Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime with support for stateful MCP servers, enhancing AI agent development.

Developers can read more about S3's 20-year journey in Twenty years of Amazon S3 and building what’s next and about the early customers that shaped cloud computing in How three startups helped Amazon invent cloud computing.

— Reporting contributed by AWS engineering teams.