​Apple cuts AWS spending, signs with Google: Report

Apple has reportedly inked an enterprise cloud agreement with Alphabet's Google for between $400 million and $600 million, which has seen the iPhone maker reduce its reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

CRN has reported that the search engine giant landed Apple as a customer for its Google Cloud Platform late last year, but said it will still be using AWS infrastructure to run parts of iCloud and other services.

The contract breakdown is vague, and it remains unclear if the $400-$600 million figure is an annual sum or a set amount of capacity.

"It's kind of a puzzler to us because vendors who understand doing business with enterprises respect [non-disclosure agreements] with their customers and don't imply competitive defection where it doesn't exist," an AWS spokeswoman told the online publication.

File hosting service Dropbox announced earlier this week that it was planning to build its own internal cloud for its storage service and slowly wean itself off AWS.

"Amazon Web Services has, and continues to be, an invaluable partner -- we couldn't have grown as fast as we did without a service like AWS," the company said in a blog post.

"As the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system."

Pursuing the hybrid route, Dropbox said it will invest in its own datacentres and work with AWS where it makes sense.

Similarly, in the coming months, Spotify will be moving its infrastructure to Google Cloud. The music streaming service said its content-delivery service -- including the storage of its music files -- will remain on AWS.

AWS on Wednesday announced that its AWS Database Migration Service, previously available as a preview, is now also available to all AWS customers. Although previously in preview mode, the AWS Database Migration Service has seen over 1,000 databases from the likes of Expedia and Pegasystems already complete the move over to its AWS cloud since January 1, 2016.

The infrastructure arm of the American ecommerce giant also celebrated its 10th birthday this week, announcing in its 10 years it had taken on 1 million active customers in 190 countries, and witnessed its database services reach a $1 billion revenue run rate -- not including Amazon usage.

Apple executives revealed last month that its "freemium" iCloud service had 782 million users on more than 1 billion Apple devices.

In 2014, Apple experienced a breach that saw an alleged hacker crack the iCloud accounts of celebrities, such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, exposing their personal photos.

On Wednesday, however, the attacker behind the infamous scandal pleaded guilty, admitting to prosecutors in a Los Angeles courtroom that he was guilty of hacking into both iCloud and Gmail accounts belonging to well-known household names and celebrities.

It was revealed that Ryan Collins, a 36-year-old from Pennsylvania, posed as staff members from these companies and requested their login details. Once armed with this information, Collins then accessed at least 50 accounts belonging to the iCloud storage service and 72 Gmail email accounts between November 2012 and September 2014.

Although he was not charged with uploading the content, Collins faces up to five years in jail as a result of his crime.