Users have to add less than 100bn objects to Amazon’s public cloud for it to reach one trillion. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) – the company’s cloud storage service – held 905bn objects as of the end of March, the company said today.

Users request access to those objects about 650,000 times per second, with occasional peaks.

Growth in the number of objects stored in S3 has not been a straight curve. It grew from 2.9bn at the end of 2006 to 262bn at the end of 2010. Then, the amount of objects took the biggest leap it had ever taken, growing to 762bn by the end of 2011.

The amount of objects added at one time can range from a very small amount added by one user or 200 terabytes added by a company or a government agency. One example of the latter was announced just last week.

In a joint announcement with the White House, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it had recently added 200 terabytes of DNA-sequence data – genomes of about 1,700 people - to the Amazon cloud. The data was contributed by the 1000 Genomes Project, an international research effort by a 75-member consortium.

The project’s goal is to sequence genomes of more than 2,600 people from 26 of the world’s populations.