Apple’s iCloud may be looking to revolutionize the way consumers interact with the cloud, but that doesn’t mean Cupertino’s not drawing on its competitors expertise when it comes to actually hosting their online services.
In fact, Apple’s pushing the iCloud online with more than a little bit of help from both Microsoft and Amazon.
According to Infinite Apple, iCloud is using both Windows Azure and Amazon Cloud Services for storage.
While it might seem ironic that Apple is using the cloud expertise of Microsoft and Amazon to bring iCloud to market, this is probably a good thing for consumers. If the past decade have shown us anything, it’s that Apple has a hard time bringing web services successfully to market… just look at the MobileMess debacle. And as much as Microsoft and Amazon might not release products of Apple’s quality, they have far more expertise when it comes to cloud computing, serving and distribution. If it means a clean and easy iCloud launch, I’m all for it.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
18 responses to “iCloud Is Built On The Backs Of Windows Azure And Amazon”
The page doesn’t exist at Infinite Apple.
I agree. Unexpected, but probably wise.
And that’s why MS and Apple are no real competitors. It’s more like MS and Apple vs Google and Facebook, isn’t it?
If you RTFA, you’ll see that that Apple is storing everything on iCloud except the URIs to the resources, which they store on Azure. This is vastly different than what is presented in this article, which is that Apple is using Azure for storage.
Per the original article, “We don’t believe iCloud stores actual content. Rather, it simply manages links to uploaded content. (Caveat: iCloud is currently in beta, and details may change.)”
Apple did not build a gazillion dollar data-center so that they could rely on Azure or EC2 to store data.
Also, the title of the article is just pure link bait. I expect better from CoM.
Remove the quotation mark from the end of the link.
The problem I see is that if the data center is really that important, then there needs to be more of them around the world so data doesn’t have to travel that far. It still needs to be on a CDN located closer to potential users.
Link to “Infinite Apple” goes no where. Maybe you should find a different source, as I find the premise of this article suspect.
Given that the link to Infinite Apple is broken this article needs some other citation(s). Otherwise it’s just speculative hearsay not worth reading …
The link just has an extra quotation mark at the end of it. Remove the quotation mark and it works fine: http://www.infiniteapple.net/a…