While Apple has built out a significant network of data centers to support iCloud and other services, it still relies on other companies to help support those services. According to CNBC, Apple has a multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services that sees Apple paying Amazon $30 million per month.
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In a February job posting, Apple said it was looking for someone who could “lead and architect our growing AWS footprint.”
Indeed, that expenditure is on track to expand.
At the end of March, Apple’s spending was on track to average more than $30 million per month in the first quarter of 2019. That would be more than 10 percent higher than a year earlier, according to two people familiar with the spending.
The report's sources indicate that Apple's current agreement with Amazon involves a commitment to spend at least $1.5 billion on AWS over five years, making Apple one of the top customers for Amazon's rapidly growing AWS business.
Apple is of course continuing to invest heavily in its own cloud infrastructure, revealing last December as part of its new Austin campus announcement that it planned to spend $10 billion over five years on U.S. data centers, including $4.5 billion by the end of 2019.
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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.
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