Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
A report on Monday indicated that Apple is spending upwards of $30 million a month on Amazon Web Services, suggesting Apple’s spending had increased by about 10% over the previous year.
Today, The Information disputes these claims. It says that Apple spent about $370 million across 2018 (roughly $30m per month) but that is actually down compared to the year previously. In fact, Apple reportedly paid $775 million for AWS in 2017, which means 2018’s numbers represent a 50% drop.
The Information article indicates that Apple is aggressively transitioning its iCloud services to running on its own in-house servers.
Here’s a link to the paywalled Information article.
This makes a lot of sense. Apple has long shown that they want to own as much of their process as they can. As I said a few days ago, Apple’s continuing dependence on a competitors cloud services seems counter-intuitive.
This makes sense to me.
Highly available infrastructure on that scale takes a long time build out and the SRE’s to run it don’t grow on trees.
AWS spend was triple the current levels in 2016 while their user base and usage has grown significantly in those 3 years. They’re doing an amazing job.