According to a report from The CRN, Apple has signed a deal with Google to use the search giant’s Cloud Platform for some of its iCloud services. Apple reportedly established a $400 to $600 million deal with Google last last year and has, as a result, “significantly” cut down on its reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to the sources, Google executives have told partners that Apple is spending between $400 million and $600 million on Google Cloud Platform, although this couldn’t be independently confirmed. Also unclear is whether this range refers to an annual spending rate or a set amount of capacity.
While the money Apple is now paying Google was previously spent on AWS, Apple has not stopped using Amazon’s cloud computing services entirely. Apple has never confirmed the cloud services that power iCloud, but past rumors have pointed towards AWS and Microsoft Azure, suggesting Apple will continue using multiple services to meet its needs.
According to a report from The Information‘s Amir Efrati, which he tweeted out earlier today, Apple will be utilizing the next several months to transfer some of its cloud-based needs away from Amazon Web Services, and instead opt to use Google’s Cloud Platform instead. According to Efrati, the transfer could take up to a year, and will probably not make Google any money — just like it didn’t make any money for Amazon.
It’s true, @iCloud to be partially powered by @googlecloud. But will take a year & unlikely to be profitable. @awscloud lost $ from iCloud.
— Amir Efrati (@amir) March 16, 2016
Since last year, Google has been aggressively pursuing deals for its Google Cloud Platform, led by former VMware CEO Diane Greene. Google and Amazon have been involved in ongoing pricing wars, but Google claims to be the “price/performance leader” in public cloud and says its Google Cloud Platform is between 15 and 41 percent less expensive than AWS.
It’s believed that Apple is planning to further reduce its dependence on AWS and other cloud services by moving more computing to its own data centers. The company is currently spending billions to build new data centers in Arizona, Ireland and Denmark.
Source: CRN
Apple Switching some of its iCloud services to Google’s cloud platform