Strange Bedfellows ⇥ crn.com

Kevin McLaughlin and Joseph Tsidulko, CRN:

Alphabet’s Google has quietly scored a major coup in its campaign to become an enterprise cloud computing powerhouse, landing Apple as a customer for the Google Cloud Platform, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told CRN this week.

Since inking the Google deal late last year, Apple has also significantly reduced its reliance on Amazon Web Services, whose infrastructure it uses to run parts of iCloud and other services, said the sources, who all requested anonymity to protect their relationships with the vendors.

It baffles me how a company the size of Dropbox runs 90% of its operations independent of third parties, but Apple does not — they also use Microsoft’s Azure platform to run iCloud. Why doesn’t Apple entirely control their own server farm infrastructure?

Update: Mark Bergen, Recode:

It’s a win for Google, which is gunning for larger companies as cloud customers. But it might be short-lived, as it looks like Apple is also simultaneously building out its own system to bring data stored on its millions of devices in house. […]

According to a source familiar with the matter, Apple already has a team working on this; it’s known internally as “McQueen,” as in Steve. It’s unclear if that project will materialize or when. But a source tells Re/code that the codename refers to Apple’s intent, sometime in the next few years, to break its reliance on all three outside cloud providers in favor of its own soup-to-nuts infrastructure.

I’m only surprised that this has not already happened.