Apple's Spending on Google Cloud Storage On Track to Soar 50% This Year (theinformation.com) 44
Apple executives have taken swipes at Google in the past over its privacy practices. But the iPhone maker trusts Google enough so that over the past year it has dramatically increased the amount of Apple user data it stores in Google's cloud, The Information reported [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter. From the report: The increase cements Apple's status as the largest corporate client for Google's storage service, dwarfing other high-profile Google customers such as ByteDance and Spotify. As of mid-May, Apple was on track to spend around $300 million on Google cloud storage this year, which would represent an increase of roughly 50% from all of 2020, the person said. Inside Google's cloud unit, the person said, staffers have even given Apple a code name that hints at its size: Bigfoot.
Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares if Apple is storing stuff in GCP, if it's encrypted and they don't give Google the keys?
Trying to whack Apple for being inconsistent on privacy because they use GCP storage is really stupid if Apple is using data-at-rest encryption that doesn't involve giving Google the keys, just the same as using AWS EBS or S3.
Non-story.
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Well that's a whole other question. I can't imaging that Apple would be using 3rd party storage without using some form of data-at-rest encryption, since it's a core requirement for basically any data security policy worth speaking of. That, of course, doesn't rule out massive incompetence.
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Well that's a load of senseless fear-mongering there, don't'cha think?
encryption keys are readily accessible if one has [...] the login and password and [is] able to pass two-factor authentication [...] If a third party gains control over the user’s [...] account, they can download and decrypt information.
You felt like these breathless statements deserved to be bolded as if it were something profound? Of course a bad guy will be able to access your data if you give them your username, password, and 2FA key. You may also be surprised to learn that thieves can drive your car away if you give them the keys. Nearly every system that allows you to view your data from the Web—as iCloud does—has this same "problem". There's nothing sh
Re:Encryption (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares if Apple is storing stuff in GCP, if it's encrypted and they don't give Google the keys?
But is it encrypted?
Yes. Using a minimum of 128-bit AES encryption. [apple.com]
The headline you linked is oversimplified to the point of being factually wrong, and as a result you seem to have conflated the question of whether the data is encrypted-at-rest—it definitely is—with the question of whether Apple holds the keys. Whether it's encrypted-at-rest is the question that's relevant to the topic at hand, since we're discussing whether Google can snoop on the data. Google can't. As for who holds the keys, Apple does indeed hold some of them. The link I gave above does a good job at providing a high-level summary of which keys they hold vs. which ones you hold (i.e. which data is E2E encrypted), but in all of those cases the data is encrypted in transit and at rest, so carriers and providers won't be able to access it.
Apple's white papers are fairly easy reads for most of the folks who frequent Slashdot, so you may enjoy their platform security white paper [apple.com], which goes into a lot more detail on the topic.
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I think that the reason has more to do with people buying Apple phones because they hate Google and don't want to give them any money. Sorry, guys, but you're still indirectly giving Google your money every time you pay your monthly iCloud storage charges. Just like you're indirectly giving Amazon money via AWS hosting charges when you do basically anything on the Internet at this point.
why? (Score:3)
Why would they want to store their data on Google's servers, not their own?
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: why? (Score:2)
Yep, and only really worth taking on the overhead where there's a clear benefit. The Apple Silicon transition is a good example. Historically it didn't make sense for Apple to develop their own processors. PowerPC, Intel, then Samsung made sense at the time. That changed as Apple's priorities diverged from Intel's and the Ax chips pointed towards an opportunity to use that expertise to shift towards Apple Silicon.
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A primary reason would be speed; it is probably way faster to buy/rent storage on a cloud service than building racks and racks of storage servers
Why should it be faster for Google to build racks and racks of storage servers than for Apple to do so?
Does Google get different laws of physics? No.
and that is assuming Apple has physical space in existing data centers. If they need to more data centers buildings, that is a multi-year wait.
Why should it take longer for Apple to build data center buildings than for Google to do so?
Also this past year, there have been disruptions in the electronic parts supply chain.
Why would these disruptions affect Apple but not Google?
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Why should it be faster for Google to build racks and racks of storage servers than for Apple to do so?
The main purpose of Google's cloud business has been to build racks of storage servers. 1) They already had the capacity before they leased to Apple. 2) That does not mean Apple cannot build out capacity in the future. But if those plans require constructing another building, that might take years.
Does Google get different laws of physics? No.
Never said that.
Why should it take longer for Apple to build data center buildings than for Google to do so?
Google already had the data centers so that others can use their services.
Why would these disruptions affect Apple but not Google?
Google already had the hardware in place; Apple would need to build the hardware.
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Do they? Just how big is Apple's cloud?
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I imagine it's really damn big, and growing bigger every day. They have to store everyone's iCloud backups somewhere, including all their iOS users' photos, videos, text messages, music, etc. And, the iTunes library needs to be somewhere for distribution too, and there's never really an event where music gets un-published, so that is just going to grow and grow as well.
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If GCP is getting $300 million in storage, then it's probably they are spending over a billion per year to other companies to host the data. From what I've seen that's well past the threshold where 'renting' no longer makes as much sense as 'buying', even with the geographic distribution requirements of something like iCloud, particularly with a company like Apple that already has real estate dealings all over the place.
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Do they? Just how big is Apple's cloud?
We don't know how much they're storing in their own servers, Amazon's, Azure's, etc., but they're storing roughly 8 exabytes in Google Cloud [appleinsider.com], making them Google Cloud's largest customer by far. Hence the "Bigfoot" code name the summary mentions that Google uses internally to refer to their client account with Apple.
As a reminder, 8 exabytes is roughly 8000 petabytes, which is roughly 8,000,000 gigabytes. To put that in perspective two different ways, it's enough to give every American just 24 MB, which does
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Because they don't want to continue building out datacenters filled with drives, and employees there around the clock to swap failed drives, etc.?
If the negotiated price they can get through GCP is less than the price for doing it internally, and it doesn't represent additional security / privacy issues through encrypting the hell out of it before writing it to Google's disks, then it's probably a cost-effective deal for Apple.
Why wouldn't they want to drop the capital costs of siting, permitting, building,
apple does have server hardware on there own cpus! (Score:2)
apple does have server hardware on there own cpus.
and that hardware sucks for server use with
NO IPMI
POOR IO for pci-e
Locked in storage that can't be hot swapped
Raid 0 at best
10G-E at best
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Indeed.
What they don't have, which they would need to source for running their own storage at this scale:
Large plots of real estate
Massive electrical capacity on the grid, redundant with really big generators and really big batteries to bridge between grid cut and generator spin-up. Probably a bunch of solar panels too, as they've done that at least in North Carolina
Massive cooling systems for the large plots of real estate which are filled with resistive heaters otherwise known as CPUs and drive motors
Big
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The capital cost is still there [Re:why?] (Score:2)
Because they don't want to continue building out datacenters filled with drives, and employees there around the clock to swap failed drives, etc.
Why not? Why would it be cheaper to pay Google to hire people and pay them to do this, rather than just pay them directly? What benefit do they get from the middle man?
If it were economy of scale, ok: Google has it. But-- Apple is big enough that they get that.
If the negotiated price they can get through GCP is less than the price for doing it internally,
Why should it be less? Either company has to hire people to do this. Why would it be cheaper for Google to hire people to do it, than for Apple to hire them? Google will then charge a premium on top of it.
...Why wouldn't they want to drop the capital costs of siting, permitting, building, and operating giant buildings of spinning disks if they can,
Because the capital cost is still there. An
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Whether Apple uses Google storage or not, Google will still be operating those datacenters because they have other customers. Google gets to split costs.
Apple doesn't, because they're the only customer of an Apple data center. The economies of scale are far better in Google's position - this is why they are running a general purpose cloud service, the same as Amazon. They basically get other people to pay for their massive hosting costs by building even bigger and billing others that they share with.
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Whether Apple uses Google storage or not, Google will still be operating those datacenters because they have other customers. Google gets to split costs. Apple doesn't, because they're the only customer of an Apple data center.
I don't think you understand quite how large Apple is. Economies of scale level out. Apple is way over the threshold where they need to use other peoples computers to spread out the cost. When you're storing 8,000 petabytes, you don't need to share service with other customers to get economy of scale-- you've already got all the economies of scale you're gonna get.
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I don't think you understand the advantages of the pay-for-use model when you use that much storage.
If I go with a storage provider, I pay for what I use at the instant I'm using it, and all the operational and capital concerns become someone else's duty. I can focus on my core competencies (portable hardware design, operating system development) and let someone who already has a competency in running internet-scale data centers run an internet-scale data center. And, because I'm a massive customer, I can
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I don't think you understand the advantages of the pay-for-use model when you use that much storage.
And I don't think you understand how large Apple is and how what affects economy of scale.
If I go with a storage provider, I pay for what I use at the instant I'm using it, and all the operational and capital concerns become someone else's duty.
And you pay for that operational and capital concerns. Since you are tiny, it makes sense for you to pay somebody else to do this. But Apple is not tiny. They are simply paying somebody else to pay somebody to do the work.
I can focus on my core competencies (portable hardware design, operating system development) and let someone who already has a competency in running internet-scale data centers run an internet-scale data center.
No, that's mis-thinking. Google in and of itself doesn't "have" competency in running internet-scale data centers: Google hires competency in running internet-scale data centers. You wouldn't be abl
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And I don't think you understand how large Apple is and how what affects economy of scale.
Apple does not assemble their own phones. They do not manufacture their own CPUs. In terms of economy of scale, Apple contracts these out to 3rd parties because Apple feels 3rd parties can do it more cheaply. Yet you feel Apple should only use their own data centers?
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Apple doesn't vertically integrate every facet of their business, and hasn't even tried since the very early days when they spent a bunch of money to make a highly automated factory that they subsequently closed in favor of using a 3rd party manufacturer. Why? Because that 3rd party knew what the hell they're doing.
Fast forward to today: Apple still doesn't manufacture their own products. Why would they when they can just call up Foxconn or Pegatron and get millions of units manufactured for cheaper than
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An example of on-prem workloads that make sense: the team I work on creates a git repository analysis tool. Shockingly, some organizations aren't very fired up to allow a multi-tenant cloud service have direct access to their code (software companies, financial, medical, government) and wouldn't touch our SaaS platform with a barge pole. So we make an "Enterprise" install that basically rubber-stamps a kubernetes cluster and installs our containers and supporting objects onto it, optionally completely air
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"Why would they want to store their data on Google's servers, not their own?
Comparative advantage.
Why do you hate capitalism?
8 million terabytes (Score:1)
From the article:
"The report claims Apple now has over eight million terabytes of data stored on Google's servers. "
I get why they said 8 million terabytes instead of, equivalently, 8 exabytes, because exabyte isn't a well-known unit like terabyte. But it still bugs me.
They could have just as easily said 8 billion gigabytes or 8 trillion megabytes, if they wanted it to make it more approachable.
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"The report claims Apple now has over eight million terabytes of data stored on Google's servers. "
I'm lost. Can this be expressed in terms of a car analogy, or number of football fields?
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I'd rather have it in the standard comparative data storage unit: Libraries of Congress.
Thanks.
Apple is good at encapsolating. (Score:2)
Apple has a darn long track record, of being the best partners to its biggest competitors.
Apple and Microsoft, While they may compete on the Operating System, Apple is a big customer for Microsoft in their Office Suite, Also when the iPhone got email support they worked with Microsoft for exchange integration (Well very shortly after the iPhone came out).
Apple and Samsung, while their phones are competing with each other, Apple partners with Samsung for a lot of the iPhone Components.
We have seen Apple bei
relationship with Samsung (Score:2)
To put a finer point on this, Apple brought such a scale of orders to Samsung for displays, Samsung built massive production capacity with that revenue commitment from Apple. Then they used that production capacity to make displays for their own phones more cheaply than any other LCD manufacturer could. This is how they dominated the Android market and are competitive with th
Business 101 (Score:3)
Here's the position every business wants to be in:
The stuff I sell is unique to my business, and I can charge a premium for it.
The stuff I buy is generic and can be sourced competitively, keeping prices down.
So iCloud is really theyCloud (Score:2)