APPLE'S PROJECT MCQUEEN: BUILDING CLOUD DATA CENTERS

According to a report from the Financial Times, Apple Music has surpassed 10 million subscribers earlier this year. In an interview, Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Apple gave a more precise figure: 11 million subscribers.

According to figures reported in Q1/2016 of Apple, there were 1 billion iOS devices installed iCloud. Eddy Cue said that currently Apple's cloud service had 782 million users, meaning that some people owned multiple iOS devices and shared iCloud account.

In recent months, Apple has quietly developed a project called "Project McQueen" to build their own data center to make the company not dependent on the cloud computing services from the third party, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, according to sources from VentureBeat.

Apple is not satisfied with the speed of loading pictures and videos of iOS users when the company uses cloud computing server of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Apple even has bought land in both China and Hong Kong to build a database for the company. Currently, the majority of Apple's online services, including iTunes, are using the database system from the third party and mainly Azure. Recently, Apple has also decided to use Google's services to replace part of the Azure and AWS.

The McQueen project was conducted after conversations between Microsoft employees and Google employees. Microsoft employees said that Azure would not be able to "afford" the data volumes which were growing more and more in the future of Apple, Apple was likely to pay more for Microsoft so that the company could upgrade the database to serve the development of Apple.

Apple's employees said that if companies built databases, they could "refund capital" for Apple in just over 3 years. Previously, Apple has built data center to support iCloud, but with the current development, Apple will need more data centers. And once this is implemented, Apple users will not take much time to retrieve the data stored in the cloud. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yahoo all use the infrastructure of their own to support hundreds of millions of their users. Apple is now trying to do the same thing.

Unlike Amazon and Microsoft, Apple does not have a database system for its cloud software developers to run their applications. The McQueen project will help Apple do so without the need to rent database from rivals.

However, the McQueen project is still planned. Maybe Apple will still maintain the use of cloud servers of other companies or they can acquire the cloud computing companies.