The part about Apple is not accurate. Apple operates several dozen datacenters, has spent north of $30 billion building them and expanding them in recent years, operates their own Kubernetes (was Mesos) cloud platform that looks a lot like Heroku internally, and leverages public cloud for a couple parts of iCloud as a redundancy play, and no more. Maps helped prompt the expansion from single-homed iTunes legacy datacenter strategy, but even that iTunes legacy has been online since the early 2000s. Note that my context ends almost a decade ago, so, there’s that. The fleet dedicated to Maps alone when I worked there was large enough to be its own FAANG/MAMAA.
They’re in the datacenter game long term. In no universe does Apple “host iCloud in other company’s clouds”. Apple is notoriously a control freak and would never place their strategic services at the whim of cloud AZs. That idea was proposed and quickly eliminated. (Believe it or not, it is possible to spend that much on Azure/GCP and still only use it for basically blobs. How do you think they moved so easily
in 2018ish?)
They’re in the datacenter game long term. In no universe does Apple “host iCloud in other company’s clouds”. Apple is notoriously a control freak and would never place their strategic services at the whim of cloud AZs. That idea was proposed and quickly eliminated. (Believe it or not, it is possible to spend that much on Azure/GCP and still only use it for basically blobs. How do you think they moved so easily in 2018ish?)