Uhh.. I am not wrong. It’s in their earnings reports and stuff. They do not run iCloud in AWS. That is old and wrong data.
Apple has been doing Cloud stuff forever. Do you know what CloudKit is? Every app dev gets 1 PB of storage for free, 200 TB of CDN (they run their own CDN too), 10 TB of database, logging, monitoring, container management, etc.
CloudKit - iCloud - Apple Developer
Store your app’s data in iCloud and keep everything up to date across devices and on the web.developer.apple.com
There is absolutely no Azure. GCP is a small secondary storage footprint to AWS S3. All the compute is Apple owned data centers and the lions share of storage is on-prem. Apple is too big for AWS. They are almost the size of AWS themselves.
ARIN Whois/RDAP
ARIN is a nonprofit, member-based organization that administers IP addresses & ASNs in support of the operation and growth of the Internet.search.arin.net
Apple owns 17.x.x.x because the data center footprint is so big. They maintain their own backbone, peering, etc.
The clouds serve as a capacity backstop, play to run GPU jobs, etc.. Things that are hourly workloads and fill gaps. The bulk of persistent workloads is on-prem. They have in excess of 10 million square feet of data center space and over a million bare metal servers.
A rare look inside Apple’s expanding Reno data center
Apple continues to expand its Reno data center, which now measures 1.1 million square feet. Here’s an inside look at the expanding facility.www.rgj.com
Inside the fortress: Apple's 1.3 million-square-foot Mesa data center
The Arizona Republic took a rare tour inside Apple's 1.3 million-square-foot data center on the corner of Signal Butte and Elliot roads.www.azcentral.com
A Look Inside Apple's iDataCenter in North Carolina
Apple has provided the first look inside its data centers in a series of media interviews designed to promote its use of green energy, including a short video clip inside its iDataCenter in North Carolina.www.datacenterknowledge.com
And that 2019 article is so far off base it’s silly, that relationship between AWS and Apple is billions, not millions. Apple has been building data centers for over 10 years and has been the largest storage customer of NetApp, Dell, etc many times.
I think this is an example of where both of us is right. Here is another source (which is newer than some of your sources). And that article also says that this was a multiyear contract they have with AWS. However, this article also confirms how it is investing in its own data centers too.
Apple spends more than $30 million on Amazon's cloud every month, making it one of the biggest AWS customers
Apple is a big spender on Amazon's cloud — and that isn't going to change anytime soon.
Here is another article that also talks about this deal. From 2021.
Apple uses AWS | Apple icloud | How apple relies on Amazon web services
Did you know Apple uses AWS? How much ever the conjecture, we're presenting you facts that will clear this doubt. Apple's Cloud, aka, iCloud is used in...
www.turningcloud.com
Here is an article about that talks about Apple spending $300 million on Google Cloud in 2021.
Apple is now Google's largest corporate customer for cloud storage | AppleInsider
Apple has dramatically increased the amount of data that it stores on Google's cloud services, suggesting that its storage needs have grown faster than it can handle with its own servers.
appleinsider.com
And this makes sense. It’s smart business not to rely on one data center if you can afford it - and Apple can. Clearly, Apple doesn’t talk about what part of its cloud infrastructure is on its own servers and what’s on 3rd party, but it’s clear they are doing both.
