CNBC:
As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship: Apple is spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon’s cloud, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
Apple’s cloud expenditure reflects the company’s determination to deliver online services like iCloud quickly and reliably, even if it must depend on a rival to do so.
Add in this comment from John Gruber:
A decade ago, pre-iPhone, Apple was notoriously behind on large-scale cloud services. But AWS only got started as a service in 2006, the year before the iPhone debuted. It was based on infrastructure Amazon had been working on since the 90s, sure, but it wasn’t a service Apple could even consider until 2006.
iCloud was launched in 2011. That’s 8 years. If Apple is still largely reliant on AWS today, why? Maybe they just honestly figure they don’t need to do it all themselves.
I’ve long wondered why Apple makes such heavy use of AWS. Is this simply because they don’t have the internal chops to deliver bulletproof cloud in the same way as Amazon? Is there more to it, perhaps a subtle piece in the complex business relationship with Amazon (Amazon sells some, but not all Apple products, Amazon’s video streaming service competes with Apple’s coming TV+, Amazon Video lives on Apple TV, etc.)
Funny, I spent almost $900 on my own infrastructure and it’s going to last me many years. What is it? A Synology NAS. Once I sold my Mac Pro and have a MacBook Pro for my main computer, a NAS is a no-brainer. But next time it’ll be a more expensive Thunderbolt 3 NAS so I can work directly on photos on the NAS rather than pulling them over to a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure to work on them.
Who needs cloud services?
Do you not use an online backup service?
I’m betting it’s just simple dollars and cents. And the old “core competency” argument. Somebody(s) at Apple does the math: How much would it cost to pull into Apple internal what Amazon is providing as a service. Is it more than the $30 million? It’s likely more than they want to spend this year/quarter/whatever. So write the check to Amazon and move on. While it’s a staggeringly large number to a lot of us, I’m betting that number for the capacity/competency they are getting from Amazon is viewed as a value.
(raises hand)
Because it’s not just ‘cloud’. AWS offers a lot of services within its overall offering that makes it an offering that’s very hard to compete with unless offering a similar overall product is core to your business… and it’s not core for Apple.
I mean go to aws dot amazon dot com (Can’t post links here…) and scroll to the Explore Our Products section. You don’t need to click anything… just look at all of the categories that “AWS” covers. No way is Apple creating their own versions of most of that.
Now add I cost. $30m/month is peanuts to Apple as an amount and if they did this all themselves they’d not even save all of that because they’d have the overhead of engineering, devops, added infrastructure, etc. Why take all that on when providing these services isn’t in your business plan?
Agreed. I think most people don’t realize just how big AWS is. The breadth of AWS is impressive, and AWS is on the order of 100x Apple scale.
Not a stretch to say they’re becoming a utility.
Is this simply because they don’t have the internal chops to deliver bulletproof cloud in the same way as Amazon?
They could build such a service, I’m sure … but it would be very expensive and difficult, and there’s no compelling reason to do it in-house?
Just like they don’t (yet?) build their own wireless chipsets or video chipsets.
“A NAS on your local network” is not remotely comparable to AWS.
(Who needs cloud services?
Well, companies that need high-availability CDNs, for one, or scalable service provision?
Like, oh, I dunno, maybe Apple might have some vague uses for either of those things, and no great desire to have to own server farms itself to provide them?
“Cloud services” is not just – indeed, for corporate uses mostly is not, I think – “uploading files onto someone else’s computer” ala glorified FTP.)
There’s no point in owning your own stack when it comes to commodities. The ROI in duplicating AWS in-house would probably be highly negative… compared to ROI in developing their own chips (massively positive); physical device structure (likewise) and software (again).
It might not be the last place they’d invest, but it’d be near the bottom, after things like share buybacks and dividend payments.
Apple has the technical acumen, raw capital, plenty of Apple Music/iTunes/TV reasons, existing data centers running on solar & carbon-neutral renewable energy, a plethora of customers, a Services revenue stream that keeps growing exponentially, a genuine crusade in support of personal privacy, and a burgeoning video service ready to change our world.
So what’s not to like about ‘rolling your own’ AWS, Apple?
I guess Apples production studio could flop catastrophically. The iPhone could hit a brick wall and stagnate for years and years. Apple would then have all these data center assets that nobody wants to use because it’s not AWS. Or they simply refuse to deal with municipalities. Or Cook is simply trepidatious since the failure of AirPower & Ping and can’t commit to anything larger than an AirPod. I think not.
A $4.5 bn investment in data centers this year alone is nothing to trifle with. Their brand of AWS is probably still in development and likely a couple years away from prime time.
So why is it taking them so long to make their own AWS?
Just look at their progress over the past 5 years and that should be all you need to know.
I was joking. My point was I don’t need limited junk like Drobox, and iCloud is pretty useless for anything other than iOS device backups, Photos app, etc.
“Hostile” is a bit of a strong word, no? I believe Backblaze’s recent AMA on Reddit addressed some reasons for this.
Maybe, but when you own one and they whine about their unlimited plans not being available, who would think that’s reasonable when the word unlimited doesn’t mean that?
No, because they are all hostile to NASs. At least the ones I can find, other than Synology’s own C2 service, but it’s a bit pricey. So I’m actually thinking about AWS glacier for a backup. Or by backing up the NAS to a 10TB drive and then backing that up to an online backup service. But I’m not sure what those backup companies would do if they figured out what I was doing.
They used to pay a lot more, around 3X more per month for (mainly) AWS storage in 2016. It’s also been rumoured that they used Azure as well although no one has ever reported numbers.
Apple use AWS as part of a multi-cloud (aka “polynimbus”) strategy for resiliency’s sake. Apple use a mixture of their own hosted systems, AWS, GCP and Azure to operate iCloud and other services. If one goes down, i.e. a region-wide or service-wide S3 failure, as has happened in the past, the rest just keep on truckin’, and most, if not all, iCloud customers don’t notice the difference.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/apple-now-relies-on-google-cloud-platform-and-amazon-s3-for-icloud-data/
are they using Amazon software to run iCloud etc or just Amazon hardware. cause it makes sense to rent server space when you are just getting started. now that they have more data centers etc Apple can wean off that rental