Amidst the World Wide Web turning 25, a company in Seattle was having a little celebration of its own.

On March 14 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of Amazon S3, described as “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.”

To say the eight years which have passed since then have been a success is an understatement to say the least.

With over 5,000 consulting and systems integrator partners, 3,000 technology and ISV partners, as well as more than 1,100 software listings for customers, it’s difficult to argue against Amazon as the market leader in infrastructure as a service.

In April last year Amazon announced the S3 cloud was storing more than two trillion objects – or 20 objects for every single person ever born on Earth. To put it into …