Apple's iCloud infrastructure executive leaves

SAN FRANCISCO: Signalling Apple's plans to reduce dependency on external Cloud services, the company's executive Eric Billingsley, who was in charge of operating infrastructure for iCloud services, including the iCloud Drive document storage service, has left the company.

Billingsley's old team now reports to engineering vice president Patrice Gautier, CNBC reported citing industry sources late Friday.

Billingsley's group relied to a degree on external public Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to handle the computing needs of iCloud services.

Data centre infrastructure in the past had been "a bit of a problem child", a source was quoted as saying. 

Patrick Gates, another executive who reports to Gautier and runs infrastructure for some services including Siri, has been "righting the ship", the source added.

A major AWS outage in February had impacted Apple Music, iCloud services and iTunes among other services.

Billingsley, who had earlier worked with eBay and Google joined Apple in 2013. His exit could signal Apple's plans to depend less on external Cloud services and more on its own data centre infrastructure as part of its "Project McQueen".