Amazon’s cloud service dominates the Internet so thoroughly that it’s scarcely worth noting new customers. Unless, that is, the customer in question is … Apple.
Tucked away in a Monday New York Times piece on the online-storage price wars lies this brief but interesting nugget (AWS is Amazon Web Services—i.e., Amazon’s cloud):
Apple’s iCloud storage service and other parts of Apple, along with operations at several large banks, run inside A.W.S., say people familiar with the service who spoke on the condition they not be named so they could sustain relations with the powerful cloud company.
You have to love the Timesian sourcing on that one, by the way, which at 24 words comes in five words longer than the actual information attributed to said people. Not to mention the possibly intentional ambiguity of which “powerful cloud company” these unnamed folks so desperately want to sustain relations with. (Both Amazon and Apple would qualify, depending on how literally you want to read this sentence.)
See also: Amazon’s Cloud Is The Fastest Growing Software Business In History
In any event, this revelation is intriguing in a couple of respects. It’s certainly not the first time Apple has used an outside company to provide Web services—see, for instance, Akamai, which delivers software, music and video downloaded from Apple’s website and the iTunes store.
But Apple is usually obsessed with micromanaging every aspect of its technology and services. So some of its users might be surprised to learn that they’re storing their backups and other personal data not on Apple servers, but on ones rented from Amazon. It’s not totally clear that anyone should care about that, but you never know.
Of course, iCloud is also in the midst of a big transition, as it preps new consumer-storage services as part of Mac OS X Yosemite and its CloudKit service designed to provide cloud storage for iOS apps. And Apple has been building out data centers at a furious pace, with the latest one slated to start up sometime this year in Prineville, Ore. (My former colleague Taylor Hatmaker snapped some photos of the construction for ReadWrite last year.)
See also: Apple Is Taking On Amazon And Google With A Big Server Giveaway
So possibly Apple is just short on server capacity until Prineville spins up. Though it’s understandable why the company might not want to advertise its apparent dependence on — For more information read the original article here.
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