Rumor: Apple's iCloud powered by Microsoft, Amazon servers - Page 2

I would prefer it was all Amazon. However MS might up their game.

You may look at it that way it is your right, I on the other hand I do care about about what company I keep. It makes shaving easier, if you can figure out what I mean, although I have a question on that one given your opinion .

I think it would be a grave miscalculation to think that the whole world will stick their data in US controlled clouds. They won't. They've learned from GPS how vulnerable, unreliable, and inaccessible it can be. Read: manipulated. Used as a strategic and a political weapon. Therefore non-US user markets will develop their own cloud systems. Just like the experiences with GPS inspired the Galileo, Glonass, and Baidu projects, and the Japanese, Indian, Brasilian, and Australian plans to each also build their own nav systems.

Neither of the above is correct. Apple does not serve the enterprise server market and apparently has no desire to do so. While at one time they dabbled with it, they are no longer selling a server for applications like this. Apple is wise enough to 'stick to its knitting' and do the things it does well while outsourcing the things it doesn't.

It's similar to Sony. Sony makes PCs, but you can be sure that Sony's backbone operations are not run on Sony PCs. Sony's PCs are consumer-oriented products and if they do anything with businesses, it's no more than small business operations which really operate like home computers.

It's really about time that people learned that 'computers' is not a single market and there's no rule that someone has to participate in every computer market segment.

There aren't many choice. Apple wont be using Google's Server. Which left them with Amazon and M$ only. The rest aren't enough Big enough for Apple's requirement.

I think Apple will continue to build very Large Datacenter in EU and in Asia as their very Backend. And Using M$ and Amazon Cloud as front end.

5GB per person * millions of iPhones and iPads.

But the thing is, it's not just having the capacity to store that data, that is the easy part.
You also have manage upload, process, and push of millions of photos, documents, settings, application data, and more every minute. Apple also has to keep track of each of these things thrown into iCloud individually so they know what is there, what isn't, what's been pushed, what hasn't, what's changed and what needs to be updated on other iDevice's or OS X, etc. Providing that kind of access is going to be a pain in the ass; I can only imagine how they scaled that database to be able to handle such a load and how they managed to keep the servers able to supply all of that data simultaneously to every iDevice without any slowdown.
Storing data is easy, keeping track of it is not. Scaling applications like iCloud is a not as simple as Google's email system.

Thanks for posting that great link. I learned a lot.

It is not an area I would claim to know all that much about but I would have thought Apple would use Unix severs which I though ruled out anything from MS. I expected to hear Apple had teamed up with Oracle and would be using Sun hardware to be honest. Alternatively perhaps even IBM minis. Do MS offer anything other than Windows based servers?

Well, that's it then. iCloud will fail. If Microsoft are hosting it, the privacy will be porous - both to provide MS with backdoors to snoop for pirates (they never trust end users) and because MS security is sloppy at the best of times. I'll not go anywhere near MS if I can help it.

For a while now I've seen Apple veering away from being an independent company, and one which seeks to make money from being an adjunct of Microsoft in the Enterprise. iOS is great for syncing with Windows servers, but awful for syncing with OS X servers. All the efforts go into moving Apple software closer to Windows. The Apple server line is bereft of serious attention at the software level, and there are still compatibility issues with File Permissions in mixed Windows/Mac environments which use Mac servers.

Apple are selling out just to make money. No wonder Steve Wozniak left.

This is one of the more absurd rumors I've heard.

1. Apple always avoids entrusting their user experience to third parties when they can.
2. Why build a data center if you're going to outsource it?
3. Azure is way too new/unproven for them to even consider much less rely on.

Have you got a source for that?

I know Windows Server has a limitation on running a process across many processors (the Windows version I assume the Azure Appfabric sits on has a 256 CPU/2TB RAM limitation) but I wasn't aware of any limitation for running many process across many servers (something which in my mind would have been handled by Azure rather than Windows Server itself)

I would have thought the latter would be more important for something like iCloud. i.e. there isn't so much of a need to run one user process really fast but rather a need to run many user processes.

My guess is Apple would have coded iCloud in Java or platform independant C++. The server hardware/OS everything is on wouldn't matter so much.

Actually that's the benefit of something like Azure or Amazon. You just pay per unit of traffic/storage/CPU and leave the hardware and scaling up to the datacenter guys.

It let's you get back to focusing on the user experience rather than the backend details.

Look at these photo. Those look to be HP Proliant servers.

Apple is a consumer product company. Any corporate inroads have been ancillary to selling consumer products. It's server products have also been geared to small scale operations. Apple historically has used some of its own products for server operations. For example, XServe and Web Objects as the front end for iTunes. However, it also uses other companies server and data base products. Once Apple started buying data centers, it isn't hard to understand why it dropped X-Serve. It wants to focus on the front end for consumers, not the back end.

Some sites suggest Apple used Solaris for MobileMe.

On its jobs site, Apple claims its data center environment consists of MacOS X, IBM/AIX, Linux and SUN/Solaris systems.

Further, it states one center will have a heavy emphasis on high availability technologies, including IBMs HACMP and HAGEO solutions for high-availability clusters, Veritas Cluster Server, and Oracles DataGuard and Real Application Clusters.

Job prospects are also asked to know storage systems using IBM, NetApp and Data Domain, and data warehousing systems from Teradata. Networking positions require a familiarity with Brocade and Qlogic switches.

As Apple focuses on consumer products, it might as well rely on companies for the back end that have a proven track record in server solutions, which has never been Apple's strengths. I doubt Apple is using Microsoft's or Amazon's server farms unless the demand is larger then Apple's three farms can deliver. For instance, it probably would just be licensing the product to use on its own servers. The choice of Amazon wouldn't' be hard to understand either, since Amazon was one of the pioneers of cloud computing.

Sure smells like crap. I'd be more inclined to believe the solution leaned heavily on z/OS and Linux. So there's my contribution to making stuff up and publishing it, trying to desperately fill the attention void.

Just wanted to point out that I am pretty sure Apple already uses third party servers for idisk. IF they are still relying on third parties for support I'm not sure how iDisk is evidence of a fail or success.

Personally I think the rumor is BS. More likely they are using sun and Hp servers and probably running linux.

"Apple may be hedging its bets with both Microsoft and Amazon in order to avoid any mishaps with the iCloud launch. Amazon has in recent months suffered a series of embarrassing outages that have shaken customer faith in its cloud services."

So, go with Amazon? Hedging its bets to guarantee "embarrassing outages"?

"The Register reports" -- the three words that let you know everything you're about to read is total nonsense. The Register doesn't report, it publishes fiction.

There are some odd posts here. Apple has 3 data centers, right? That's not enough for the world's access to iCloud reliably and quickly. You need secondary servers to spread out the service for speed and redundancy. Apple has doing this for at least most of their iTunes Store existence.

They even use other companies for relaying their streaming which you can see in your web browser's address bar. It's not some crazy notion, it's highly expected they would farm out to reduce load and better the service for customers.

Hot-swappable clouds - that's mind blowing.

That's as far as I got too, before i dismissed the rumour.

I can't imagine Apple using Amazon for it's primary iCloud hosting. They might be okay for redundant iCloud hosting until such time as Apple has built redundant systems.

Apple's long term strategy is not revealed by today's partners or "hires.". My personal guess is that this is a low risk cost, capital investment, to learn what makes sense to insource and outsource. Simple dumb plumbing may be right approach, but if Apple goes disruptive in the cloud all bets are off. I

f it chooses to push the technology and business models it will be on Apple's private infrastructure. Microsoft and Amazon are more than suppliers they are powerful competitors (Samsung has also elected to become and Apple will treat them accordingly) and Apple will not have the leverage or privacy it requires in the long run. So day1 of iCloud is not necessarily the model of the future.

This is not without precedent.

In 1994 Apple bought a customized version of PL/1 code from AOL to create the short-lived eWorld online service. It even ran on Stratus computers, like AOL.

Marketing was the difference between AOL's success and Apples failure. AOL spent millions on marketing, while Apple spent thousands.

i agree

I can't see Apple letting anyone else put Apple customer info of any kind on servers that Apple doesn't control, so the bits of the rumor that imply that will happen I call false. Yes they use partners for iTunes but that's just for the purchase items (the music, movies etc). The customer data has stayed with Apple.

Now could Apple be using said software on Apple controlled servers. Yeah I would say they could. Why not. It is software made for large scale server situations, something OS X Server has never been able to handle (I'm not sure it was ever meant to)



1. The page hit when you came to read the story (might be two if you aren't using a RSS feed for the headlights)
2. The page hit when you came to comment how stupid the story is.

Cha-ching

AI doesn't have any, apparently. This is an ongoing chronic problem here. Makes it feel cheap and second rate compared to the other Mac sites I frequent.

They've only built one data centre and compared to Microsoft and Amazon there fairly new to the game of running there own data centres. iTunes is bascially the only large cloud operation they have and that's mainly hosted by other people.

As they've only built 1 data center it also means it's only in one country. Doesn't make much sense sending all of Europes data all the way to the US when there's hosting they can use over here.

Lastly I don't know how much involvement Steve Job's actually has with Pixar but they launched a version of there rending software for smaller studios last year that built in Microsoft Azure, so it's not the first time he's used it.

Dropbox relies on Amazon S3 and compared to iDisk it is more reliable.

I wonder how you'd go about applying for that position. My grammar has always been praised, so I'd love to be a proofreader in a semi-professional sense.

It's not about trust. Its about smart business practices. You always have multiple vendors for services. If one of them fails you have a backup with the other. All companies do this. Apple does this with all of its hardware suppliers as well....

This is RUMOR ---- This is RUMOR ---- THIS IS A RUMOR!!!

Apple could still be using XSan or something for hosting the iCloud, we don't know for certain that they are using Microsoft technology on noting this.

Of Course, the most stable way would be to use Linux, after all, or some Unix variant....maybe IBM Power 7.

"By comparison"?

"Jack has three coins, one of which has been discussed many times and is very large. By comparison, Jill, has 24 coins." The only coin that's ever been in the news (in Apple forums) is the one big coin Jack has, and yet *none* of us even know the value of *that* one, let alone any of the others.

Comparison, indeed. Jill might have a bunch of pennies, and Jack might have two pesos and a quarter, for all this crackerjack reporting tells us.

If I understand you, I think you're missing the point. It sounds like Apple is using Azure + Amazon in such a way that they'll only have an outage if *both* Azure and Amazon go out. Since this is only a rumor (and from The Register, at that), who knows if that's what they're doing.

This is false. The data center I use is 50,000 sq ft in the center of OC California with lots of top companies. I know the datacenter engineers quite well and they have told me that the ratio is 60% Windows and 40% Unix. The truth is that top companies have lots of different server requirements and they generally use a mix of Windows and Unix. I have a cabinet there and I have about 50/50 ratio as well.


Maybe JSP (Java Server Pages) which is quite likely, but not Java. C++ has no run time environment, so no. I think it will be platform independent and will likely use Oracle, which is also platform independent, for their database. Hopefully the script language will be JSP.


This of course is the correct reason, however, I am surprised Akamai was not mentioned since I believe they have a broader global deployment than either Amazon or MS.

It's not bullshit. Apple has neither OS nor expertise to run the cloud backend. Why not just rent cheap storage and Linux servers from Amazon, people who specialize on the cloud storage and their business model is renting online computing and storage by the minute.

Apple exited the server business this year, and abandoned support for Java (guess what one of the major cloud cluster computing frameworks is based on Hadoop - which started as Java project). Apple wants to build end user devices and portables. But the other major part of this equation is the backend services and cloud computing. I think this will come back to bite Apple in a big way in a decade or so, when the rest of the industry catches up to the trend, and when your end device you use to "touch" the cloud becomes less relevant.

I disagree that using the word "poached" in this manner is illegal. To address your proposed argument: this isn't a crowded theater, and nobody is actually shouting "fire". (Did the word "poached" actually frighten you and make you want to run out of the room you are sitting in?)

What you are really wanting to say is that this may be an instance of libel, with Apple as the victim. But I think that argument fails too. Most people reading this will recognize the use of the word "poached" as just an artistic vivid verb. That's because there is actually no such thing as "poaching" a human. The definition of the word is confined to the illegal taking of wild animals and plants. At best, you could chastise the writer for using it inappropriately, since it also implies illegal behavior that he can't prove.

[Update: Well, I was wrong and take the previous paragraph back, because apparently "employee poaching" has graduated from a euphemism to an actual term with a law attached and everything. However, still, in the case of this post and context, I still believe the next paragraph...]

But I don't see the malice, the harm, or the person that's really going to care enough to raise a snicker over it. (Except you just did. Are you especially sensitive to such topics?)

Thompson

This explains the death of XServe.

JSP is Java. You still need the JVM and majority of your code is in Java , you just expose it by writing "scirpts" to call into these Java classes and convert results on the fly to dynamic HTML on the server.

Writing web code in C++ is insanity, you get the unsafe code, slow development cycles and language that is slower to develop in. Java is light years ahead of C++ for web development. But if performance is not an issue, then Ruby and Python are excellent choices as well.

No expertise? I'd think iTunes Store in and of itself qualifies Apple as an expertise in running services from the cloud.