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Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for some of iCloud
- kziojzwsndppqgg 9y agoApple runs absolutely ludicrous amounts of its own storage. The idea that they use GCP for 100% of anything is insane. Saying they “use GCP for iCloud” sounds intentionally misleading... there’s a missing qualifier there. But I guess “uses GCP for some stuff in iCloud” isn’t nearly as click-worthy I guess.
- spac 9y agoCan you provide any reference or evidence to support these statements?
- amyjess 9y agooflannabhra's comment elsewhere in this thread gives a source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465498
- swvjeff 9y agoFrom a post right above: > From Apple’s actual iCloud security document: >> The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform.
- spac 9y agoThere must a misunderstanding. I was asking supporting evidence that Apple ran its own storage. This is evidence that Apple is using storage service from other companies.
- kziojzwsndppqgg 9y agoNothing in public, no. Apple doesn’t talk about this stuff generally. But I know because I helped build a lot of it.
- rconti 9y agoI'm familiar with the kind of amounts of storage (in terms of cabinets, # of arrays) for various reasons, and I assumed it was the iCloud storage because of how vast it is. On the other hand, with the high-end gear they're using, likely the cost/GB is insane and more than Google or AWS charges them. I can't imagine the big cloud providers are buying top-end arrays, but I could be wrong.
- buildbuildbuild 9y agoiCloud is a product with much larger storage requirements than compute. Prior to iCloud's launch Apple built a massive $1bn datacenter in North Carolina and has continued to build new facilities at an aggressive pace. I presume they are leaning into large public cloud platforms when their own capacity runs low. https://www.cultofmac.com/31260/aerial-footage-of-apples-new-north-carolina-data-center-shows-massive-facility/ https://www.cultofmac.com/31260/aerial-footage-of-apples-new... http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/02/apple-inc-massively-expanding-its-icloud-data-centers-in-nevada-oregon http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/02/apple-inc-massivel...
- aburan28 9y agoYes along with their fancy new data centers in Prineville, Mesa, Maiden and Reno!
- gtsteve 9y agoWhy would that be insane? I'm sure that you can negotiate a better deal if your use-case is beyond what a normal customer would use.
- gutnor 9y agoThat's actually exactly the opposite of what Netflix (I think) was saying. Netflix point was that basically Cloud provider are very good as long as you are a regular user (which can still be massive volume) Snowflake customer requires too much custom feature and that lead to less competitive prices. When you reach the point you pay Amazon/Google/Apple as solution provider (think SAP, IBM) you need to bite the bullet and build the expertise in-house to avoid unhealthy ties between your and your provider business. See also, Apple Maps.
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- randomdata 9y agoConsidering that the original document linked to in the article also explicitly mentions S3, I don't think anyone is lead to believe they use GCP for everything.
- madeofpalk 9y agoWell considering the amount of people in just this HN thread who didnt read the original document linked, it's almost certainly guaranteed people will take that impression from the headline and poorly worded article they'll read on Gizmodo or whatever.
- wbkang 9y agoGoogle Cloud Storage does have an S3 API so maybe they migrated some off AWS.
- valarauca1 9y agoA lot of cloud providers offer S3-esque services. Even DO and Azure are getting into that game.
- fzss_ 9y agoI was
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- puzzle 9y agoApple definitely does not use GCP for 100% of anything, but it could be done. A migration like that couldn't happen overnight anyway, as I'm sure you know. Google hit the first 1EB of raw disk space a long time ago. Or you could look at power consumption as a proximate for capacity.
- discodave 9y agoPower consumption is probably not a good proximate for disk capacity. Dense disk capacity has way lower power per rack than compute. Unless you know the overall compute/storage ratio, very hard to figure out storage capacity. The reverse might work if compute power consumption overwhelms storage power consumption. On the other hand, it might be easier to infer storage than comoute from rack positions, or square feet of dc space. Only so many spinning disks per cubic meter. Also, there's a Reinvent talk from several years ago with "8 exabytes" in the title, so surely Google and Amazon both have many exabytes by this point.
- puzzle 9y agoYou can make educated guesses about which range the compute/storage ratio is in if you look at e.g. public information from talks like http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Keynote.pdf http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Ke... (it has other useful information that might not have been mentioned anywhere before, like the crazy Colossus on Colossus... or D, the GFS chunkserver replacement) You can use that to revisit Randall Munroe's estimates: https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/ You can infer from some of the comments that e.g. very dense disk capacity is not a good idea. There's more, of course, but I can't go into details (ex-Googler).
- xapata 9y ago> many exabytes Like, a hellabyte? I'm still trying to make hella- happen as an SI prefix.
- dang 9y agoGood point. We've added "some of" above.
- neotek 9y ago"Intentionally misleading" describes practically every headline ever written about Apple.
- Theodores 9y agoThe 'insane' part is that Apple are supposed to be the hardware manufacturer and should therefore have cheaper costs than a supplier that is not primarily a hardware manufacturer. Clearly there is more to the storage game than hardware. However, if Apple can make their own chips, can make their own computers, can make their own operating system and even their own cloud storage, it is odd that they rent out someone else's x64-x86 rigs.
- puzzle 9y agoApple took a long time to get this cloud thing right and had to play catch-up. No wonder they flew a helicopter over Google's nearby data center when they were working on their first in NC.
- dijit 9y agoI wonder if this raises questions about privacy, if you're ultimately going to end up in googles eco-system in a way anyway why would you want middleware? As a cloud provider I really like GCP compared to others.. it's clean, consistent, predictable and easy to use. Speaking personally in my employment AWS always sent sales folks and Google always sent engineers, this makes me more comfortable too.
- jeromegv 9y agoHosting encrypted data in the Google Cloud is not the same as having the Google ecosystem where you willingly let Google harvest your email/history/location/etc.
- olfactory 9y agoSo you don't think Google has access to the traffic logs?
- jacksmith21006 9y agoApple does then get Google security. They have found most of the big vulnerabilities including Shellshock, Cloudbleed, Heartbleed, Broadpwn among others.
- nik736 9y agoInteresting that Dropbox is saving a lot of money chopping off AWS while Apple relies on Google for exactly the same thing. I would think that Apple would host and build an inhouse solution, really curious what the reasoning is to go with GCP.
- dijit 9y agoGCP charges pennies for storage; they auto-dedupe on the backend too. Although I imagine the bandwidth is a high cost. Speaking of cost, Apples war-chest is not small- if anyone can afford a premium, it'd be them.
- nik736 9y agoI am not sure what you mean with pennies, they charge the same as AWS, and Dropbox just showed that doing everything inhouse saves them millions of $$.
- muninn_ 9y agoSure but when you take all factors into consideration it may not be worth the cost.
- epicide 9y agoWhen you are one of the largest companies in the world, millions really isn't all that much (for your infrastructure).
- IncRnd 9y agoWhat is the measure you are using for Dropbox being one of the largest companies in the world? In the beginning of 2017 Dropbox claimed a $1 Billion dollar run rate, however at the end of 2017 Dropbox had a net loss of $110 Million. When your entire year is a loss of $110 Million, saving $75 Million is very important to the companies survival.
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- _sdegutis 9y agoStrange that they're using Google and not Amazon, considering Google (and MS) are direct competitors in the mobile device space. Also this doesn't imply that user privacy is less secure, since they probably still encrypt user data before it goes to Google's servers.
- romanovcode 9y ago> since they probably still encrypt user data before it goes to Google's servers. It still looks pretty bad for them.
- bpicolo 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&feature=youtu.be&t=25m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&feature=youtu.be... They take security for these things seriously. You can store data safely even in adversarial clouds.
- rsynnott 9y agoHow does it look bad for them? I don't really get how moving from Azure to Google Cloud is really of interest to anyone much.
- eli 9y agoThere's been an interesting trend of big retailers transitioning away from AWS because Amazon is a direct competitor: https://www.retaildive.com/news/report-walmart-asking-suppliers-to-quit-amazon-cloud/445509/ https://www.retaildive.com/news/report-walmart-asking-suppli...
- karambahh 9y agoIn Europe, we are seeing an reverse trend. 5 years ago, selling SaaS hosted on AWS to retailers was an instant no-go "we're not funding our competitor" was told to many of my competitors Nowadays, they've come to the realization that by refusing to do business with companies relying on AWS they were in effect loosing more money. (I am specifically referring to retailers in orders of magnitude of WalMart. mom & pop shops never cared or asked questions)
- mtgx 9y ago> But in the latest version, the Microsoft Azure reference is gone, and in its place is Google Cloud Platform. Ouch. For Apple to move to Google's cloud infrastructure, they must have been truly disappointed with Microsoft's Azure...
- dkersten 9y agoA friend messaged me this morning saying he logged into his work Office 365 account and noticed a lot of the URL's (eg for attachments and such) point to AWS services like S3. If Microsoft themselves use AWS instead of Azure.. wtf?
- addicted 9y agoThat would be surprising. Although it’s also possible they have 3rd party extensions which are making the AWS calls.
- maxyme 9y agoI actually interviewed for the O365 team and yes, they said they don't trust Azure at all and host everything they can on their own private cloud. Didn't hear anything about S3 but they really didn't trust Azure, wouldn't be surprised.
- oblio 9y agoThey don't trust Azure as in "Azure is flaky", or "we're running our own unit, here"? https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-... Though I think their average quality has went down lately (from the days of Excel pcode to the current days of Office 365), I've been seeing Powershell exceptions thrown directly in the UI in the Office 365 Admin...
- oflannabhra 9y agoFrom Apple’s actual iCloud security document: > Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys and the file’s metadata are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform. From what I’ve heard, Apple’s services run on their own cloud platform called Pie [0]. It sounds like this platform probably abstracts away whatever storage service is used, allowing Apple to use whatever fits their requirements. [0] - https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/06/report-unified-cloud-services-backend-pie-platform/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/06/report-unified-cloud-services...
- flixic 9y ago[Apple] Pie in the Sky for Cloud platform. Clever name, looks like clever tech.
- exelius 9y agoEvery fortune 50 company has a similar system at this point; you tie it in with your enterprise architecture platform so you can go directly from design to infrastructure using tested patterns. Pretty much table stakes in large enterprise at this point; and as usual IBM / SAP / Oracle / SoftwareAG cabal have bought up everything that matters.
- oil7abibi 9y agoIdk, seems like that would be a pretty standard abstraction layer to implement at a large company.
- ksec 9y agoSorry if this is an naive question. If every large companies are doing it, why aren't there a standard open source abstraction library available?
- deleted 9y ago
- jagger27 9y agoI thought that's what their DCs were for. It definitely seems a bit out of character for a company that designs its own silicon to outsource something so comparatively trivial.
- sethhochberg 9y agoOutsource the easy things so you can focus on the hard things - custom silicon provides a lot more unique value for Apple customers than commodity cloud storage.
- radiorental 9y agoIf the cost savings of rolling your own versus paying someone else marginally more are not there, why bother? It gives Apple flexibility and avoids secondary technical and real estate type debts.
- fixermark 9y agoEmphasis on the real-estate. It makes sense for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to build out datacenters because they're both using them for their core business and selling compute and storage resources to third-parties. Unless Apple intends to get into the cloud computing business, eating the cost of tooling up a datacenter puts a big construction and maintenance cost on the "Liabilities" side of the T-sheet that they can avoid via a smaller rental cost.
- what_ever 9y agoReal-estate is probably the cheapest part about datacenters. You also seem to be forgetting how much cash Apple is sitting on.
- selectodude 9y agoI'm know how to change the oil on my car, it would quickly become cheaper for me to get the ramps and the oil catch pan and such instead of pay somebody else to do it, but I'm still never going to do it. I don't want to keep that stuff in my house, I don't value the extra few dollars I pay for somebody else to handle it. The fixed costs to save some money in the long run are irrelevant because I don't want to be handling any of it to begin with. Now, if I had a fleet of cars, the calculus may change on that.
- walrus01 9y agoWhat happened to the giant Apple-owned datacenters such as in North Carolina? https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&ei=UR6UWsvnK8fdjAOLobCgDw&q=apple+datacenter+north+carolina&oq=apple+datacenter+north+carolina&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i71k1l8.5020.5400.0.5474.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.0.0....0.tfYXf5e1CIU https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&ei=UR6UWsvn...
- euroclydon 9y agoAren't those for music and videos?
- TomMarius 9y agoI guess they use these and the cloud services in conjuction. There should be an Apple technology that abstracts the specifics away.
- scurvy 9y agoThere should be! Any serious consumer of cloud storage has an abstraction layer that let's you store new data in arbitrary locations on site or across public clouds. Companies frequently write their own middleware connectors.
- oflannabhra 9y agoI would guess that nothing happened to them, and that they have never been used to store encrypted iCloud data. Apple has an enormous amount of data that needs to be stored beyond iCloud: iTunes, App Stores, Apple Music, etc. I'm sure they store much of that data in-house. There is also the possibility that Apple eventually plans to move iCloud to their own storage solution, but hasn't yet scaled up to it yet.
- megaremote 9y ago> iTunes, App Stores, Apple Music, Would it really require a datacenter to store that small amount of data?
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- jacksmith21006 9y agoNot really surprising. Plus it has to be a lot cheaper then Apple building their own.
- pmlnr 9y agoI don't think this is true long term. The cheapness of cloud applies when and where deploying otherwise complicated systems - eg. a hadoop cluster - can be done in matter of clicks, but for something simple - file storage - I'm finding it hard to believe that it's cheaper. However, in case of apple, geo distribution and locality is probably very important, which adds to the cost for sure; I'd still be surprised if long term own/rented hardware wouldn't be cheaper, than SaaS.
- 013a 9y agoEspecially for object storage. The scale where deploying your own object storage network gets cheaper than S3 is surprisingly small. Even handling your own equivalent of "intra-zonal redundancy" is easy. The main concerns arise in "how do you CDN that data to your customers" and "how do you gain redundancy beyond intra-zonal"; that's where S3/GCS gets more interesting.
- ddorian43 9y agoThere are other CDN beside aws/gcs.
- jjrh 9y agoWho is saying they aren't going this avenue? It would make sense to me that they would slowly increase their own infrastructure, testing it's reliability and over time decrease their reliance on third parties. Apple has enough money to tread carefully and roll things out slowly.
- dna_polymerase 9y agoCheaper? Bullshit. Look at Dropbox, they saved $75M since they moved out of AWS. If you are a big player like Apple, the cloud is a horrible choice.
- sashk 9y agoI've seen (via Little Snitch) at different times, Apple Photo has been downloading data from Amazon, at&t cloud (?) and Azure — at least it's what I allowed it to use up until now. I didn't see Google yet, probably, it's recent development.
- Zak 9y agoI thought this was the case. I was sharing mobile data over wifi to several iPhone users with some basic data use monitoring so that I could firewall services that used unreasonable amounts of data. One of them, despite having all the automatic update and backup features we could find turned off regularly attempted to upload gigabytes of data to multiple IP addresses that resolved to Google Cloud. Since there were fairly few apps installed (none of them suspicious) and a large number of photos and videos on the device, my conclusion is that it was a spurious iCloud photo backup. Unfortunately, iOS does not appear to provide a way to see what's using data on Wifi, only mobile, nor to designate a Wifi network as metered.
- illumin8 9y agoIt could just be using iMessage. When you send photo and video attachments using iMessage, they get stored on iCloud for some period of time so that other users can view or download them.
- Zak 9y agoThe user was not sending large attachments. While attempting to troubleshoot, the phone was idle. This was definitely an automated background process.
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoConsidering the technology Apple uses for spanning cloud providers, this seems unlikely. I would imagine they would proxy all of this data and you wouldn't see direct accessing of Google Cloud.
- kerng 9y agoMisleading title, should say Apple also uses Google Cloud. AWS is not being replaced here.
- kccqzy 9y agoHow is this news? Years ago I’ve observed system processes like nsurlsessiond and cloudd connecting to AWS, GCP, as well as Apple’s own infrastructure for my iCloud storage. It’s really obvious for someone who’s using Little Snitch and suddenly those processes start connecting to a new/different hostname.
- danso 9y agoThe article says claims were made in 2016. The news here is that Apple is officially confirming it.
- udioron 9y agoWhile Waze (Google) is probably still using AWS.
- jcwayne 9y agoAnd sticking with their Fisher-Price style UI.
- moftz 9y agoIt is a bit cheesy, yeah? But I do like the simplistic, big buttons with clear pictures. I don't want to have to take an extra second to decipher a material-design pictograph that sacrifices some aspect of understanding for visual aesthetic. Waze gets their users on the value the app brings to people, not how good it looks. There aren't many other players in the field of crowd-sourced traffic data like Waze shows (at least in the US) so I don't see them working on updating the UI until it actually matters.
- antoncohen 9y agoAs of a year ago Waze was using both AWS and GCP. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/guest-post-multi-cloud-continuous-delivery-using-Spinnaker-at-Waze.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/guest-post-mult...
- ksk 9y agoCould someone please explain to me why this is relevant to anything?
- bonsai80 9y agoYeah, the linked article feels like someone at cnbc is paid to come up with anything that will get clicks (I wrote that sentence kind of jokingly, but thinking about it now, of course they have exactly that) and it worked great this time. Well played cnbc. You win this round. Now hopefully there's a Rust vs Go blog posted or something gets merged into systemd today so we can get back to business as usual here ;)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ksec 9y agoSince Steve Jobs returned to Apple and Tim Cook took over operation, Apple has always been running "Asset Light" approach. The less asset the better. They value flexibility over the little benefits of owning those asset. Hence why they were very late into building their own DC, the also view the Cash they have as another asset they dont want too much. [1] Apple also view Data Storage, as another aspect that depreciate quickly and offer no strategic advantage to owning all of it. Ever Since Apple merged and moved all(?) of its Cloud operation using Mesos, things has been great every since. Last time they said it was the world largest Mesos cluster running in operation. I suspect it is even bigger by now. I wonder what happen to Project McQueen. [2] [1]www.asymco.com/2018/01/18/the-apple-cash-faq/ [2]venturebeat.com/2016/03/17/apple-cloud-project-mcqueen/
- HillaryBriss 9y agoi hear what you're saying. but how do we reconcile Apple's strategy with the fact that Amazon did invest in an "asset heavy" approach? i have been under the impression that Amazon makes a substantial percentage of its profits from S3 and other cloud services.
- ksec 9y agoI am not saying I agree with Apple's Asset Less approach, just pointing it out. I would actually want them to have more DC, and more Apple Store around the world. All should be buying them outright rather then rent. But then their Apple TV is completely opposite of their Asset Less approach, as they decide to spend more money to create their own TV Asset.
- stevehawk 9y agoYou reconcile it by accepting that they're two different business strategies with two different goals, and thus successful for different reasons.
- lawlessone 9y agoThis is like finding out McDonalds have been serving you Burger King.
- MikeTLive 9y agomore like finding that McDonalds and BurgerKing use SEXTON to source their burgers and that HAYMARKET sources to Wendy's.
- calimac 9y agoI am livid. can you imagine the fuming anger!
- viperscape 9y agoFun fact, Apple also uses(d) Azure Microsoft services as well. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/02/icloud_runs_on_microsoft_azure_and_amazon/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/02/icloud_runs_on_micro... https://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/0051209/apples-icloud-runs-on-microsoft-azure https://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/0051209/apples-icl...
- djhworld 9y agoSo from the anecdotes in this thread, along with some people suggesting Apple use AWS/GCP/Azure for things.... I'm wondering if this is a capacity thing, or maybe a locality thing? It would make sense to use the cloud providers if you don't have a data centre in a nearby region of a user I guess
- gerash 9y agoThis is really not big news. If I were Apple, I would also sort cloud storage vendors by price including building the whole infra in-house, throw away the non secure or risky ones and pick the cheapest.
- MechEStudent 9y agoSo apple is paying the maker of android to stay in business. Cute.
- synaesthesisx 9y agoIt's no secret using Little Snitch (or an equivalent network monitor) - it's interesting to see iCloud services connecting to AWS etc. No real surprising considering Spotify etc all do the same, but one would imagine Apple could run their own data infrastructure by now...
- kraig911 9y agoSo does this mean kubernetes will win? :) Why does it matter if Apple uses GCP? I think it's a terrific product and wish I could use it more. I also don't think apple and google are competitors really in the 'cloud' space. It'd be stupid to go to AWS if you were as large as Apple as companies like Apple can actually have leverage I imagine.
- bestnameever 9y ago> It'd be stupid to go to AWS if you were as large as Apple why is it stupid for Apple to use AWS and not GCP? Personally, I don't think using either is stupid.
- allyant 9y agoApple use Apache Mesos rather than k8.
- kbumsik 9y agoI am new to deploying services on cloud but I am wondering why Apple mixes cloud services between Amazon, Google, and Azure? Is there advantage over using a single provider? Maybe risk management?
- vdchuyen 9y agoTechnically, you can not build DCs globally to support all over the world. In case Cloudflare, their services are quite different to others, for Dropbox the problem is cost saving and customers, sure they don't have much customers in Asia or China. For just encrypted storage like Apple icloud, abusing cloud providers might be the best way to go. If they want to provider premium Icloud such as "Swiss-like", they could build their DCs below ground under granite rocks ...
- IamNotAtWork 9y agoApple probably needs a datacenter of its own anyway. Just think about all of the data they use internally for projects, and other sensitive stuff they would never allow to leave the network. So building a state of the art DC with low PUE makes sense. However, farming out some of the costs to other cloud providers seems like a good strategy to eliminate single point of failure, or avoid all data being lost if somehow one provider loses data. And maybe then they can focus on adding compute units rather than storage, and backup for the storage units. In short, despite Apple's user base, I still don't think it is on the scale of AWS or Google.
- outside1234 9y agoIt’s almost like Google paid Apple to use it.