[Imustaskforhelp]

upvoted & favourited because you taught me a really interesting fact which I feel makes up for an amazing discussion (regarding icloud using GCP).

also, I can't help but imagine if instead of render, it was Apple's account which could've been auto-banned (Render is almost a billion dollar company or series-B, I am not sure)

I haven't read the articles and I admit that but can you please elaborate to me on why Apple uses GCP themselves for idrive, I would love to know the technical decisions behind it on a genuinely curious level.

From my (let's face it) limited understanding of GCP, it isn't particularly good or price performant and one of the wonders is that Google sells it directly with Google photos too and an competitive lineup at android.

So in some sense if Apple is using gcp's for icloud then aren't they just reselling google storage themselves and google can always beat them in pricing while also wanting to chew away at the percentage of iphones themselves too?

I mean, I can still try to understand the google search pays apple 10 billion dollars (right?) deal but I don't quite understand why apple would pick GCP when the hosting market is one of the more competitive ones with lots of companies.

I would love to get some explainations or theories as to why exactly is that the case

(Also given its HN, if anyone from apple is reading or knows the answer, I would love that too!)

[barkingcat]

Firstly, apple doesn’t compete on price. Even if icloud is priced more than google people would always buy apple just for the ecosystem integration. It’s not even a competition to be honest.

Look up “buy or build” which is the industry term for this kind of evaluation: buy product and use it/resell it or build your own.

Apple has gone for different strategies in various areas:

Build own Apple silicon chips, do not buy off the shelf chips from intel or nvidia or amd.

Buy and resell google storage but don’t want to build their own distributed data store for end users.

It’s about what matters more for the company and the core products. Apple’s laptops, cell phones are considered core products. Icloud is a value add.

This is also why apple is making their own cell phone broadband chips. For most companies, this is a “buy from qualcolm” but apple needs to build their own for independence for their number 1 core product: the iphone.

[morpheuskafka]

> So in some sense if Apple is using gcp's for icloud then aren't they just reselling google storage themselves and google can always beat them in pricing while also wanting to chew away at the percentage of iphones themselves too?

Apple uses Samsung displays and Sony camera sensors, iirc, both of which are flagship Android phone makers. That doesn't really seem to be a concern in their procurement thinking. iCloud and Google Photos are not that direct competitors because which one is native depends on which phone you already bought. Google Photos definitely does have some market share on iOS due to having 3x the free storage and a handy compression mode (which used to be entirely unmetered at launch but now still uses storage, just less of it). But it will never be a full competitor because it is a separate app you have to install and it can't magically fetch cloud-only photos from the camera roll and photo picker UI like iCloud can.

The pricing of Google One and Apple One/iCloud+ isn't really dictated by underlying storage costs. At the higher tiers like 2TB, many don't come close to using all, while the laughable 5GB iCloud free tier clearly costs almost nothing in raw store, even on nVME SSD, if you compare it to S3/Backblaze or even raw disk pricing on the cloud.

[necovek]

Let's also not ignore enterprise realities: in your example, Samsung Displays is likely giving a great price to Apple for displays based on long-term commitment of large quantities: it allows them to optimize production and possibly give a better price than maybe Samsung Mobile for smaller-runs of phones.

Each division also cross-charges, so Samsung Mobile would be paying Samsung Displays for the screens, and possibly at a small, guaranteed and non-negotiable margin.

Without a global strategy not to do so, divisions within an enterprise optimize for their own bottom line and have internal discussions on build-vs-buy even if they have an internal factory.

[anurag]

> also, I can't help but imagine if instead of render, it was Apple's account which could've been auto-banned (Render is almost a billion dollar company or series-B, I am not sure)

I believe you mean Railway.

Render (a $1.5B company) has been hosting customers on GCP since 2018, and has never been banned.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Yes sorry I meant railway rather than render so sorry about that, it was more of an honest mistake!

> Render (a $1.5B company) has been hosting customers on GCP since 2018, and has never been banned.

speaking of which, I have a question for render but how does render prevent something like what has happened with railway (ie. the account getting banned), I would love to know more about what the team at render thinks of such and also I would love to get some thoughts on why Render is using GCP, I would love to know some architectural decisions behind it as I am curious about it!

Once again, thanks for responding to me and waiting for your response and have a nice day anurag!

[anurag]

Without knowing more about why Railway was banned, it's hard to say how we would prevent it. Render uses GCP, AWS, and now, our own hardware [1]; GCP is mostly a historical artifact; we started using AWS for most things after dealing with poor customer and sales support from GCP a few years ago.

[1] https://x.com/anuraggoel/status/2057245946652901809