Project McQueen: Apple May Be Building Its Own Cloud Infrastructure

Apple is working on a project called Project McQueen and planning to invest in its own cloud infrastructure. Apple wants to reduce its dependence on third-party cloud storage providers Amazon and Microsoft. The news of Project McQueen comes just about a day after news of Google winning Apple as a cloud customer broke.

Apple currently relies on public clouds of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Apple has also started using Google’s cloud services recently. Apple stores most of its iCloud data on AWS and Azure. According to reports, Apple is currently spending more than $1 billion each year for cloud storage.

According to VentureBeat, Apple is not satisfied with AWS’s inability to quickly load photos and videos onto its iOS devices. Apple’s own infrastructure could fix this and Apple executives reportedly believe that investment in a complete cloud infrastructure could pay for itself in about three years.

A conversation between a Microsoft employee and an Apple employee led Apple to kickoff Project McQueen, sources told VentureBeat. “Azure won’t be able to handle the growth of Apple’s workloads in the future, and Apple would have to pay much more in order to help Microsoft cover the cost of expanding Azure’s data center infrastructure,” reports VentureBeat.

Project McQueen: Reduced cost, improved service

Apple’s move to make a deal with Google seems to be related to cut costs before their own infrastructure is ready. Google has been known as cost-effective cloud service provider. It looks like Apple will partially move its iCloud data to Google’s storage from AWS which will help them cut the cost.

With Project McQueen coming to reality, Apple could be saving cost and will be able to provide better services to its customers. Apple is said to be investing $3.9 billion to build new data centers in Arizona, Ireland and Denmark, and its first data center could start functioning later this year. According to VentureBeat, Apple has also bought land in China and Hong Kong to build new data centers.

Recently, Dropbox announced its successful switch from AWS to its own cloud infrastructure, moving huge pile of data (500 Petabytes).

It is worth noting that Project McQueen is not more than a ‘thought’ and it is possible Apple might not go ahead and execute it.

What do you think about Project McQueen? Do share your thoughts with us.

Sources: VentureBeat, Re/Code and CRN