Cloud News: Both Apple and Dropbox Begin To Move Data Off Amazon Cloud

There’s been some significant Cloud news this week and it all borders around the Amazon Web Service (AWS). Dropbox has begun migrating its data from the Amazon cloud to its own technology. This was contained in a post the company released on Monday by Dropbox. How does a company this big still rely on other infrastructure you may ask, but here’s how it works. Dropbox stores two data types namely the file content (the actual information) and a metadata about the file including users. It decided to store the file content on Amazon while the metadata was stored at its own data centre. This may have been a business decision at the time to store these heavy files at a location much bigger than its own but now they feel it’s time to move to their own platform completely as said in the post ..”as the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system. There were a couple reasons behind this decision. First, one of our key product differentiators is performance. Bringing storage in-house allows us to customize the entire stack end-to-end and improve performance for our particular use case. Second, as one of the world’s leading providers of cloud services, our use case for block storage is unique. We can leverage our scale and particular use case to customize both the hardware and software, resulting in better unit economics.”

The second big cloud news is that Apple may have struck a $400m-$600m Cloud deal with Google; strange bed fellows you say and I agree. This is according to Channel news company  CRN in a post which noted that since Apple made the deal last year, it has begun relying less on the Amazon Cloud… “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.”

The move comes as Apple aims to invest about $3.9b/777b Naira in three data centres with two in Europe (Ireland and Denmark) and Arizona in the United States. They are due to commence operations in 2017. Part of Apple’s iCloud services run on Amazon infrastructure.