AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon S3 turns 20, Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver general availability, and more (March 16, 2026)

Twenty years ago this past week, Amazon S3 launched publicly on March 14, 2006. While Amazon Simple Storage Service is often considered the foundational storage service that defined cloud infrastructure, what began as a simple object storage service has grown into something far larger in scope and scale. As of March 2026, S3 stores more than 500 trillion objects, serves more than 200 million requests per second globally across hundreds of exabytes of data, and the price has dropped to just over 2 cents per gigabyte — an approximately 85% reduction since launch.

My colleague Sébastien Stormacq wrote a detailed look at the engineering and the road ahead in "Twenty years of Amazon S3 and building what’s next," and if you want to read about those earliest customers and how they shaped what AWS became, I recommend "How three startups helped Amazon invent cloud computing and paved the way for AI." Twenty years is worth pausing to celebrate.

Alongside the 20th anniversary of S3, Channy Yun also wrote about a new S3 feature this week: Account regional namespaces for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets. With this feature, you can create general purpose buckets in your own account regional namespace by appending your account’s unique suffix to your requested bucket name, ensuring your desired names are always reserved exclusively for your account. You can enforce adoption across your organization using AWS IAM policies and AWS Organizations service control policies with the new s3:x-amz-bucket-namespace condition key. Read Channy’s post to learn more about account regional namespaces for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets.

This week’s featured launch is one I have a personal connection to: the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver. I wrote about the preview of this capability back in December at re:Invent 2025, and I had a great time putting that post together, so I am happy to hear that it’s generally available now. Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver is an innovative feature that enhances the performance and reliability of DNS routing for global applications. It allows users to define and manage routing policies that direct traffic to the nearest or most optimal destination based on factors such as latency, bandwidth, and availability. This capability is particularly beneficial for businesses with a global customer base, as it ensures that users are routed to the nearest data center, improving response times and reducing latency.

In addition to these announcements, AWS continues to invest in its ecosystem, with new features and improvements being released regularly. The company’s commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction is evident in its ongoing efforts to refine and expand its services. As Amazon S3 turns 20, it serves as a testament to the power of cloud computing and the transformative impact it has had on businesses worldwide. With the launch of new features like account regional namespaces and the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver, AWS remains at the forefront of cloud technology, providing solutions that empower organizations to scale, innovate, and thrive in an increasingly digital world.