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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

I imagine they got nervous about the prospect of being dependent on Oracle. They'd be far from the only company to draw away from Sun stuff when Oracle took over.

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Did Apple not continue to use Oracle software as the backend to iCloud?

That's not any real dependency as having millions of consumer installations...

The have iCloud abstracted and diversified anyway (also uses Azure, AWS, etc).

They use whatever tool is best for the job. Take a look at their careers site, you'll see they use all sorts of databases internally.

  Sr. Database Architect
  
  REQUIRED TECHNICAL SKILLS :
  RDBMS: Oracle
  NoSQL DB: MongoDB
  Columnar DB: Vertica
  OS: AIX, LINUX, Solaris
  Replication: Streams, Golden Gate

Apple actually no longer uses Azure. They use AWS (S3) and Google Cloud: https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.....

Wrong link?

No. The section about iCloud says:

  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.

The 2017 version of this document had "Azure" in this list. The 2018 version replaces it with Google Cloud.

Yeah, but it also says "such as", so it might not be exhaustive.

Oh, okay, I only searched by "Amazon", "AWS", and "Azure", and didn't find anything.

Even today if you look at the headers in a message to or from an iCloud email account, it indicates "Oracle Communications Messaging Server" and years ago it was the same, but replace Oracle with Sun. I think they may well have been using the same thing since iTools email started back in January 2000.

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