Apple Spending $30 Million Per Month on Amazon Cloud Services

AWS = the smartest, most insightful move Amazon ever made

This is likely for Storage, which Apple likely considered as commodity. Apple also uses Google GCP, Microsoft Azure for their Storage system.

This is likely for Storage, which Apple likely considered as commodity. Apple also uses Google GCP, Microsoft Azure for their Storage system.

That's right. Apple is spending a huge amount on their own infrastructure. But supplementing this with third-party infrastructure allows them to expand or contract as business requirements dictate.

Many people not in the IT business may not be aware that corporate IT has moved to a more "market driven" decision-making approach, thanks to private and public clouds. In the old days, individual corporate departments did not pay for their use of IT infrastructure; IT was costed centrally, and each department would have to apply to the IT department to gain additional infrastructure, such as storage space. Highly inefficient. Now, internal IT departments provide cloud services, and "charge" each department per usage; its common to have a self-service portal where each department can "buy" some amount of private cloud storage, etc. And, in order to keep the IT departments efficient, corporations may allow each department to choose to alternatively buy such services from third parties, such as AWS, effectively providing competition to inside IT.

So many assumptions with so few words. Good on you.

1. We already knew Apple were using AWS, Azure and GCP for iCloud Storage.
2. Storage has always been a commodity. The real cost for Cloud Storage are in Transfer and Bandwidth, which in Apple's scale could easily do peering and cost them next to nothing.
3. Apple has always had an Asset Light mentality, building many more Datacenter to cater just for Storage system are considered as liability rather than asset.
4. We know Apple runs some of the largest Data Processing in house using Mesos and K8s. Such as Siri.

Those assumption are based on the above what could be considered as fact.

Or you could read the reply two post above you.

now you know why it’s not easy for apple to suddenly give everyone 64gb of free storage

Amazon is in bed with US intelligence agencies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/

Personally would rather have Apple ditch AWS for an in house solution

I believe, that one day, all of our workstations will be cheap thin-clients that access our VDIs in the AWS, or comparable, cloud. MacOS included.

What goes around, comes around. One day, all we had was a big IBM mainframe, with dumb terminals on our desks. Then came the PC, and everything was distributed. But wait, enter network cards, and now we can work in a distributed way, but all the data goes back to a server. Then here comes mobile, and everything goes back into the wild west of individual users controlling their own apps and data. Here comes the cloud to rain on that parade! Now data and apps can reside in the cloud, and everything from a phone or tablet to a desktop can be dumb again, and all the smarts (and control) lies with whoever owns the keys to the cloud. The real question is, what will the NEXT cycle bring?

now you know why it’s not easy for apple to suddenly give everyone 64gb of free storage

If Apple can't afford to allocate 64gb of storage, they are truly DOOMED! :D:p Also this isn't true because storage allocation doesn't work the way that would make your statement valid. The paltry storage that Apple currently provides isn't doled out in 5GB blocks. It's allocated on an as used basis up to 5GB. No one is advocating 64GB of free storage either. So if Apple moved to 5GB per device or 10, 15, or 20GB total, it wouldn't necessarily increase their aggregate storage totals that much. People would actually have to use it. Even if storage was tallied to fit your statement, it still not a justifiable customer facing decision imo. The entire $1.5B 5 year commitment can be paid up front. As many around here like to point out, Apple could just buy it.;) The only justification for 5GB of storage per customer is profit maximization. From a business standpoint, cool. From a customer standpoint, cheap as hell considering the relative price of their offerings.

I think Apple's use of other platforms is for redundancy. Like having multiple copies of your services saved in different physical places. Unless if there is a catastrophic Internet failure, not all services will go down all at the same time.

I believe, that one day, all of our workstations will be cheap thin-clients that access our VDIs in the AWS, or comparable, cloud. MacOS included.

Our phones will "dock", merging mobile and desktop I reckon.