Tech giant Apple will reportedly run parts of its iCloud backup service on the Google Cloud Platform instead of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
The move is a clear victory for Alphabet, the Google parent company that owns the cloud service, which came under new leadership last year. The reported cost to Apple for Google’s services is said to be between $ 400 million and $ 600 million. However, it is not clear whether this range refers to spending per year or for a set amount of capacity.
Desire To Diversify
Apple initially signed a deal with Google late last year and has spent the ensuing months dialing down how much it relies on the AWS infrastructure to run parts of iCloud and other services. Although Google has been lagging behind Amazon and Microsoft’s Azure in the cloud computing market, it has gained ground since Diane Greene was named head of Google’s cloud business in November.
However, it appears that Greene has lots of ground to make up. Only 6 percent of cloud users employ Google’s cloud infrastructure, while 17 percent use Microsoft and 57 percent use Amazon, according to a recent survey by cloud management provider RightScale.
The move to the Google Cloud Platform likely reflects a desire by Apple to diversify its Internet services. iCloud, which offers customer backup storage for photos, music, videos and other files, is one of those services. Apple is likely to operate more of these services internally in the coming years, at the expense of AWS. Some analysts have estimated that Apple has spent more than $ 1 billion a year on the AWS services.
Apple has already said it plans to build three new data centers over the next two years, which would bring the number of Apple data centers to seven.
One such facility, being promoted by Apple as a data “command center,” will be located in Mesa, Arizona. The company also plans data centers in Ireland and Denmark that are slated to go live next year. The latter two facilities will power Apple’s online services in Europe, which include the iTunes Store, App Store, iMessage, Maps and Siri.
Dropbox, Spotify Also Going Internal
Apple isn’t the only company looking to spread out its cloud services a bit. Earlier this week, file hosting provider Dropbox said that it would build its own internal cloud for its storage service instead of relying on AWS. Part of that will include Dropbox investing in its own data centers. Music streaming service Spotify will also move some infrastructure to Google, although the storage of its music files will stay with AWS.
Ten-year-old AWS said this week that its AWS Database Migration Service will be available to all AWS customers. The service was previously only available in preview mode. The fully managed service lets customers migrate their production Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL databases from on-premises data centers to AWS.
Image Credit: Google Cloud Platform logo/icons via Google.
