Oh, oh, I like doing these analogies, and we badly need AWS stickers for the office. A typical grain of beach sand – which must be about the lightest solid thi

Oh, oh, I like doing these analogies, and we badly need AWS stickers for the office. A typical grain of beach sand – which must be about the lightest solid thing that’s easy for most people to envision – is 3 mg. That many grains of sand would mass 6e6 kg (6000 metric tons), which in turn is near the upper limit of masses that make sense to most people in everyday terms. So you could say that if every S3 object were a grain of sand, S3 would be 3× the launch mass of the Space Shuttle, or somewhat more than the gold held in Fort Knox, or as much as the heaviest living thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) And the the 1.1 million requests per second would be about 3.3 kg, or as much as a gallon of milk/water.