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Eric Billingsley, director of internet services operations at Apple, is leaving the company, reports CNBC.
Billingsley is responsible for running data center infrastructure and some internet services, including the operating infrastructure for iCloud services like iCloud Drive.
His current responsibilities are being handed over to senior engineering director Patrick Gates, who already oversees infrastructure for other services like Siri. Gates has been with Apple since 2005 and will shortly take over for Billingsley.
Prior to joining Apple in October of 2013, Billingsley served as a director of engineering at Google. Before that, he was a technical fellow at eBay. It's not clear where he will be going after leaving Apple.
According to CNBC, data infrastructure has been an issue at Apple and Gates has been "righting the ship." Apple has been shifting more services to Gates' group's infrastructure as Billingsley's relies on external cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
His departure comes following a major AWS outage in February that impacted services like Apple Music and iTunes, and CBNC speculates that his exit could mean Apple plans to rely more on its own infrastructure rather than third-party cloud services.
Both Billingsley and Gates report to engineering vice president Patrice Gautier, who reports to iTunes chief Eddy Cue.
Top Rated Comments
I delete iPhone cloud backup and start all over. This merry-go-round has been going on for 2+ years.
5GB free for a number of device is woefully small, its 2017 apple. Give us a break!
My wife has 20GB of photos on her 6s+. I have Frontier FIOS with 98mbps up. Took my wife 5 days to get her photos backed up to iCloud Photos. The app constantly crashed, stalled, would sit there and just drain her battery to 0 while making the phone super hot. We restarted her phone more during those 5 days than the last 6 years combined.
I back up my photos to Google Photos so when I got my 8+ on Sept 26, I only had 400 photos to upload. That took about a day and a half even though it was only 1.7GB.
My wife's phone was unusable with 20GB of photos in iCloud photos.
Doing iCloud backups was fairly easy --- I had been doing them on iTunes (mapping iTunes backup folder to an external drive) without problem.
Then, no selective folder syncing ... WTF?! On my work computer I have Google Drive syncing a Work Folder but nothing else. If I was to put iCloud on my work computer, ALL MY DATA would be synced to the work computer. What is this? 1997? That was disappointing.
I would GLADLY pay Apple $$$ to store all of my data and photos. But Pages online feels like Google Docs from 2006... iCloud photos can't handle any load, and iCloud Drive is stuck in the 90s.
Example: A journaling app I use on iOS, I have 900MB of entries in there stored to iCloud. I got my new iPhone and .... after a few hundred MB, iCloud just gave up and refused to sync anything more as if I was inconveniencing it by asking for my data. Nothing I could do could start up the sync again. A day later it synced a few hundred more MB before giving up again. WTF?!
Sorry but compared to Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive .... iCloud has a LOT of work to do. I'll keep using Google Drive for now. It handles my 93GB of photos/videos (98k+) like a champ, storing them for free, and OneDrive happily backs it up with no problems in less than a day (I do this a few times a year).