Apple iCloud’s dependability on AWS.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. It is considered one of the Big Tech technology companies, alongside Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. It is an eminent company when it comes to mobile devices like its iPhones, iPads, Mac Books, iPods etc. It is also famous for providing its enticing hardware, reliable software and O.S, last but not the least, its “SECURE CLOUD STORAGE”.
Apple is known for its cloud services from a quite long time. The revolution of smartphones accompanied heaps of other technologies, the world was divided into four to five tech-segments, many people chose android, some selected windows and blackberry, and others embraced ios(Apple). Apple was one of the Brands who introduced, opted, and provide the cloud storage services. Apple Launched iCloud in 2012 and has flourished since then. It has more than 850 million user base across the globe.
As the iCloud was launched, it provided around 5GiB of free storage to a user. Initially, Apple was completely dependent on the cloud services provided by Amazon’s AWS cloud and Microsoft Azure cloud. It provides object storage services, therefore it used Amazon S3 and Azure blob storage. Later in 2016, it started using GCP also.
“Apple’s cloud business is hugely dependent on Amazon The iPhone maker pays $30 million a month to use AWS, CNBC reports” the April 2019 report exclaimed this, with proves from Apple itself.
Some other special key points are:
- Apple has a major multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services.
- Apple spends more on Amazon’s cloud than up-and-comers like Lyft and Pinterest.
- However, Apple is also investing heavily in building its own cloud infrastructure.
Apple explains its security policy in terms of using a public cloud, rather than its own data centre. The data is stored onto the object storage after encryption, data sliced, and further, it adds that the data was being stored anonymously, so that the secret, as well as the data, could stay buttoned up. The data is encrypted, chopped into parts, and is sent to different storage locations like S3(AWS), storage(GCP), blob(Azure). Apple pays around $360 million per year to Amazon for using S3.
From the past two years (around 2018), Apple has established Apple parks and the data is being shifted to Apple Parks Data centres also. Soon we may see the data staying within apple premises only.
Here we saw how AWS aided Apple in growing its cloud services, and similarly how Apple provided a huge customer base to Amazon.
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