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Comment by kziojzwsndppqgg | Hacker News Reader

Apple 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.

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Considering 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.

Well 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.

Google Cloud Storage does have an S3 API so maybe they migrated some off AWS.

A lot of cloud providers offer S3-esque services. Even DO and Azure are getting into that game.

I was

Apple 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.

Power 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.

You 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-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/ 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).

> many exabytes

Like, a hellabyte?

I'm still trying to make hella- happen as an SI prefix.

Good point. We've added "some of" above.

The '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.

Apple 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.

Why 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.

That'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.