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Comment by spac | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide any reference or evidence to support these statements?

Nothing in public, no. Apple doesn’t talk about this stuff generally. But I know because I helped build a lot of it.

I'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.

iCloud 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...

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

Yes along with their fancy new data centers in Prineville, Mesa, Maiden and Reno!

From 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.

There 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.

oflannabhra's comment elsewhere in this thread gives a source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465498

Reply on news.ycombinator.com