“For the past several months, Apple has been working on ‘Project McQueen,’ a plan to become more reliant on its own data center infrastructure and reduce its dependence on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure,” Jordan Novet reports for VentureBeat, citing “a source familiar with the matter.”
“Project McQueen kicked off after a conversation between a Microsoft employee and an Apple employee, the source said. Azure won’t be able to handle the growth of Apple’s workloads in the future, meaning Apple would have to pay much more in order to help Microsoft cover the cost of expanding Azure’s data center infrastructure, the Microsoft person told the Apple person,” Novet reports. “Apple executives believe that building out the company’s own infrastructure footprint to cover its cloud computing and storage needs will pay for itself within three years, the source said. ”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, when it comes to cloud services/data centers, it’s important for Apple to roll their own.
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Apple’s deal with Google for cloud services may not last – March 17, 2016
Apple signs on with Google Cloud Platform, cuts spending with Amazon Web Services – March 17, 2016
I never have understood why Apple didn’t do this in the first place. They have a couple massive server farms already, but apparently they were never enough.
Yeah I thought too they had been building the Cloud infrastructure already. With the billions in the bank to easily accomplish this why would they ever want to be beholden to anyone else?
Who wants their information in a MS cloud the way windows is hacked. Who wants their information in a gaggle could, they would only steal and sell it.
Azure as a platform supports more than just windows. You can run Linux.
I think it comes down to Apple’s data needs being massive.
When you figure everything they have going with Music, video, iCloud and app stores they store an incredible amount of data for their own services let alone expanding out a full cloud offering.
It makes to go their own route. I could see azure or Amazon being handy if you need to scale quickly but ultimately they’d want to be in control of their data in the long run.
Apple hasn’t done cloud services well at all from the beginning- iTools, .mac, @me and now iCloud. Using other cloud server solutions makes sense as long as the cost is right. But I’m really hoping that this is something much more than cost- that Apple will introduce some really great innovations to cloud services with their big investments here. Maybe this could be the ‘next big thing’ that Apple has been working on.
And to point out an interesting correlation in the story- ‘Project McQueen kicked off after a conversation between a MS employee and an Apple employee…’. Well, the iPad project (which ultimately became the iPhone project) kicked off after a conversation between Jobs and an MS employee too. Just sayin’…
“Project McQueen kicked off after aonversation between a MS employee and an Apple employee”… Was it deez guyz?!?
Just don’t call it SkyNet.
Whilst the were within what other services could handle it likely made sense to utilise them. If their needs are going to be such that those services can’t handle them without increasing the cost (to pay for the expansion) it then makes sense to just pay for their own. I doubt it will be a case that they’ll build something and then just dump everyone else, chances are that they’ll grow faster than they can build and will use a combination. At least in the near future.
That would probably be best considering should anything go wrong with Apple’s client base in the future, as unlikely that may be, they won’t be stuck with inactive capacity.. Unlike the other cloud vendors Apple will probably be the exclusive user of its server farms.