What’s the best way to put the kibosh on your competitor’s latest key cloud release?

Make a statement loaded with braggadocio yourself, as Amazon has done by announcing that two trillion (2 x 10¹²) objects are now stored on its S3 cloud – a turnaround of 1.1m requests per second.

Microsoft, of course, launched Windows Azure Infrastructure Services earlier this week, and knocked off the price of compute, storage and bandwidth between 21% and 33% in a bid for direct competition with Amazon Web Services.

As a result this latest update, in a blog post from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr, becomes even more interesting.

Amazon hit one trillion objects in S3 back in June last year, with each object in the cloud ranging from zero to 5 TB in size.

“It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number,” Barr explains.

Barr further elaborated on his post by putting these numbers into context. The most interesting – or scary, if you prefer – stat was that, in terms of paleodemography, for the 100 billion people born on planet Earth, they would be allocated 20 S3 objects each.

But what does this mean in terms of competitors’ stats? Back in 2012 Microsoft revealed that its Azure cloud stored a whopping 4 trillion objects, although the highest number of requests tailed off at a mere 880,000 per second. As reported by Tech Crunch, Microsoft has approximately 200,000 customers with 1,000 more signing up every day.

In terms of Amazon’s cloud overall, these figures may not tell the full story, as other aspects, such as large parts of the EC2 cloud, are not included in the overall count.

Yet the Amazon portfolio continues to grow and impress. Forrester’s James Staten, offering his turn of the year predictions, stated that in 2013, the words ‘cloud’ and ‘Amazon’ would not be synonymous, citing greater uptake and market share from Microsoft and Google.

It will be interesting to see whether that plays out by the time December rolls around. What’s your opinion?