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How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives
In essence - it’s a scalable multi-tenant storage service with APIs to store and retrieve objects, offering extremely high availability and durability at a relatively low cost. The mechanical arm (actuator) with its read/write head physically moves across the platter and waits for it to rotate until it gets to the precise LBA address where the data resides. Popular distributed systems like Apache Kafka are built on top of it and through sequential access patterns squeeze out great performance off cheap hardware.
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