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Comment by dzhiurgis | Hacker News Reader

So it makes sense for Dropbox to build it's own infra but it doesn't for Apple.

Also wondering why Apple isn't hosting exclusively with IBM, they seem to have the best geographical coverage.

Apple does operate its own infrastructure. It has numerous, exceptionally large data centers in the USA, Europe and China. Most notable is the $1 billion, 500,000 square foot facility in Maiden, North Carolina.

Apple probably augments their own infrastructure with cloud providers for various reasons, e.g. increasing geographic diversity, allowing for progressive growth, and to handle comparatively small jobs (e.g. merely a few hundred VMs).

I imagine it would also be a waste of Apple's time to tool up their own data centers to offer general purpose cloud computing services.

Apple doesn't have "numerous" facilities. Compared to Google or Amazon they have very few. They really only have two worth mentioning, and having only two is the most expensive thing you can do, with 50% natural overhead.

Apple has at least 5 data centers in the US alone.

And it makes sense that the overall size of their facilities would be much smaller than Amazon, Google, or Microsoft... They're not running a major search engine or offering anything like AWS, GC, or Azure.

How much diversifiable overhead does a data center have?

My spidey-sense is telling me that its very little.

A trivial Google search shows that you are entirely incorrect.

And comparisons to Google or Amazon are unreasonable, as both these companies sell cloud services. Apple does not.

I think Apple does a combination. Both (from the article) of hosting on AWS, Google, & Microsoft, but also on its own data centers.

I suppose it also depends on what is being hosted. If you look at Netflix & Dropbox, they both took control of their core piece (CDN & Storage) - not the entire end to end platform. I'd imagine Apple does something similar.

I winder what would constitute Apple's core?

Apple's core is consumer hardware. Anything they're doing on the cloud is ancillary.

I think you could make the case that iCloud is core to Apples business.

I'd venture to guess it's about the same -- CDN (for their App Stores, OS updates, etc) and storage (iCloud backups, etc). My guess is their cloud compute needs are relatively low compared to storage and content delivery.

edit: I should note that yes, as the other poster said their core business is hardware, but their core cloud needs are what I posted.

In Netflix case, I believe owning specialized and custom built systems to handle CDN & storage are essential. I think this CDN is content/media CDN, not the web tier, which I believe is still on Amazon. But feel free to correct me.

They do operate data centers already and are building more[1] but the lead times on such large infrastructure investments are not insignificant. By using cloud providers they can meet the current demand while still investing for the future and later repatriating those workloads back to their own infrastructure when it is ready.

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/02/apple-inc-massivel...

IBM may have the best coverage, but I believe their resiliency leaves something to be desired.

That said, if you're Apple, you could probably get IBM to do whatever you want.

Anecdotal, but lead infra guy for a global top 20 bank told me that IBM installed their choice of routers, and ran custom fiber into SoftLayer for them, to fix some of the more pressing SPOF issues.

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.

The same deals they do with Samsung, for example.

Playing nice with Microsoft, Amazon and Google means they will also play nice with Apple.

Because if Apple hosted exclusively with IBM, IBM wouldn't have the capacity?

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