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 …