iCloud vs. AWS: Apple Has Considered Competing With Amazon in Cloud

Unfortunately for Apple, AWS (as well as Azure and GCP) have a huge 20-year headstart on cloud computing. It's not just about letting people run VMs. Public Clouds offer managed databases, message queuing, video workloads, CDNs, object storage, TLS certificate management, IoT fleet management, Web Application Firewalls, managed Kubernetes and container environments - and so many other services that you can stitch together to build custom workloads. And it's generally very, very inexpensive if you know what you're doing. Apple does not do inexpensive very well; and based on how frequently their iCloud services go down, they unfortunately do not do reliability as well as required to offer a Public Cloud service with contractual SLAs. On top of that, Apple is a consumer-first company and Public Cloud is about business-first. It's not going to happen.

I am guessing it will be like Siri competing with Alexa...

It's a great idea, but in the end it's just not where their passion lies... and that's always been a problem in the longer run for them with this type of offering.

They'd have a snowballs chance in hell, Apple has always been so great with the Enterprise offerings.

please do it. AWS needs a real competitor.

Apple Launches iCloud UltraCore to Compete with AWS, Insists “Services Revenue Needs Friends”
by Chip Biter, Senior Cloud Speculator

Cupertino, CA — In a move that has cloud professionals everywhere choking on their free-tier AWS credits, Apple announced today that it will be “competing directly” with Amazon Web Services through a newly reimagined iCloud for Enterprise offering dubbed iCloud UltraCore™ — because nothing says “enterprise-ready” like a name that sounds like a protein powder.

“Apple is proud to enter the cloud infrastructure space 18 years late,” said Apple SVP of Software Foghorn McGlass during a keynote that involved a lot of slowly rotating white cubes and upbeat marimba tones. “We believe developers want a cloud that’s not only powerful and secure, but also... beautiful.”

Details on the service were vague, but according to Apple’s press release, iCloud UltraCore will offer:


* Elastic Instance Pricing: Starting at just $49.99/month per core, unless you exceed 5GB of data transfer, in which case your iTunes account is locked and your Genmoji privileges are revoked.
* Seamless Integration with Apple Intelligence™: So your cloud services can auto-correct themselves mid-deployment.
* Storage so secure you can’t even access it: Apple promises “zero-touch backups,” mostly because users have no idea where anything is stored or how to retrieve it.
* Apple Vision Pro Data Centers: All operations are run via Vision Pro interfaces by unpaid interns waving at holograms in abandoned Apple Stores.

Analysts were... skeptical.

“Apple’s idea of cloud computing is what happens when Tim Cook asks Siri how to upload a keynote to Dropbox,” said Lydia Rust, senior analyst at TechFarce. “They’re building the cloud like they built iMessage for Android: entirely in PowerPoint.”

Meanwhile, Amazon responded by launching a new service called “AWS Cupertino,” a single server in a shipping container parked across the street from Apple Park that already supports 12 Fortune 500 companies, 9 AI startups, and a suspiciously fast Starbucks app.

When asked if Apple would support open standards like Kubernetes, a spokesperson calmly wiped their black turtleneck and said, “We don’t really do... open.”

Still, Apple remains confident.

“We’re not here to replace AWS,” said McGlass. “We’re just here to offer a more courageous alternative.”

No word yet on whether iCloud UltraCore will support Windows, Android, or reality.